Schoolgirls try their hand at being sensory product testers
- News
- MinTU
![Mädchen malen Blumen aus](/storages/gleichstellung/_processed_/f/e/csm_MinTU_Mathe_Workshop_Spektrale_Fraktale_25d5db6eb3.jpg)
The third workshop day in the current round of the mentoring program "MinTU - Mädchen in die TU Dortmund" took place on 22 August at TU Dortmund University. Over 30 schoolgirls visited the Statistics and Mathematics departments.
Statistics
The statistics workshop was delicious. The "sensory triangle test with chocolate" is a special test that aims to identify subtle differences in taste between different chocolate products. In this test, the participants' senses are put to the test to identify nuances in taste, smell and perhaps even texture. The mentees turned out to be chocolate pros. One group was able to identify 100% of the varieties that were lactose-free and those that were not.
In addition to probabilities, the students also worked with graphics and statistics that they know from newspapers or the Internet. They learned how quickly a graph can be manipulated and how statistics can be misinterpreted.
Mathematics
In the workshop "Geometric figures and where to find them", the students went on a discovery tour: the math building, the campus and nature were closely inspected. Back in the workshop room, the participants collected the geometric figures they found: Triangle, square, circle, rhombus and many more. Building on this, the focus was on spirals and fractals, which can often be found in nature, such as in a snail shell, sunflowers or a snowflake. To illustrate this, the girls were given a picture of a sunflower to color in. A closer look revealed that the sunflower is made up of spectrals - in this case 21 and 34. The participants also learned about Fibonacci numbers. To impress friends and family after the workshop, another experiment involved mind reading. A trick in which the pupils can find out a number thought up by a person in no time at all. The participants learned about mathematical applications through many small practical insights.