Press kit of Techcamp, the Politecnico’s STEM summer course
Are you a journalist? A content editor? A blogger? Are you interested in writing about TechCamp@POLIMI?
Here you can find the official press release of the project’s 2024 edition.
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TechCamp@POLIMI: enrolment for the most technological summer school in Italy opens on 15 February 2024
350 places available, while the number of scholarships, which will cover the total cost of attendance, has not yet been defined.
7 courses on six ultra advanced STEM subjects: green energy, cybersecurity, coding, robotics mobility and artificial intelligence.
These are the figures for the 2024 edition of TechCamp@POLIMI, Italy’s first project to bring secondary school students closer to STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) courses with university-level standards. These are intensive, hands-on, limited-enrolment courses held in English. Each is a week long and is held after the end of the school year (from 10.06.2024 to 21.06.2024) on the Città Studi and Bovisa campus of the Politecnico di Milano.
If you would like bed and board, there is a partnership with a hostel in the city, but you need to organise your stay with the facility independently.
From 15 February to 31 March 2024, secondary school students from the second year on can enroll on this page (students attending a four-year study course can enroll as early as the end of the 1st year).
There are six courses taking place over the course of two weeks, all designed and led by research professors and PhD students at the Politecnico di Milano: ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE – AI Bootcamp: A Gentle Introduction to Artificial Neural Networks and Computer Vision; GREEN ENERGY – Green energy: pillars and dreams; CYBERSECURITY – Cybersecurity and hacking: doing the unexpected; MOBILITY – Race car dynamics; MOBILITY – Intelligent and autonomous vehicles, ROBOTICS – Robotics: the art of intelligent motion and CODING – Python: a language for the inventors of worlds.
The courses in detail.
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE – AI Bootcamp: A Gentle Introduction to Artificial Neural Networks and Computer Vision
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is everywhere, in our mobile phones as well as in our cars either autonomous or not. Indeed, thanks to neural networks machines, (AI) can nowadays understand a lot of the world surrounding us.
Neural networks, a computing mechanism inspired by the human brain, can learn complex tasks from examples. Today Neural Networks are becoming the most powerful artificial intelligence models when it comes to understanding images, text, or sound.
In this course we will focus on images, introducing computer vision and artificial intelligence techniques for classifying images, the simplest but perhaps most meaningful visual recognition task.
GREEN ENERGY – Green energy: pillars and dreams
We talk about it in many areas, it seems at hand and yet we seem nailed to a pole. But why don’t we make the ecological transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy tomorrow? oh come on, by 2030? nooo 2050 … so what are the problems?
In the course, designed and prepared by professors of the Politecnico di Milano of the Department of Energy we will try to answer these questions in a technical and scientific way by focusing on the three main primary sources of energy: water, sun and wind. The main issues related to the possible use of renewable energy will be addressed, from machines and systems for energy conversion, to storage systems passing through issues related to the management of the electricity grid.
CYBERSECURITY – Cybersecurity and hacking: doing the unexpected
The world around us is filled with technology and computers in particular. The systems we use every day, those we depend on, are complex, and it is just as complex to make them work correctly. In addition, extremely powerful and versatile systems are not often exploited fully, or they hold untapped potential.
Contrary to what is often communicated by the media, hacking is the ability (and art) of making technological systems (and others) do things they were not designed to do. In a certain sense, it implies the capacity to understand them ‘better’ than those who designed them.
MOBILITY – Race car dynamics
Cover a distance in as little time possible and, above all, cross the finish line before others. This is the goal of a racing car. Car races are a challenge, not just for the drivers, but also for the engineers, who are always looking new ideas to push technology to its limits and get the maximum potential out of a car. This course provides the basics of car dynamics and, in light of this, it explains how the chassis, tyres, suspension, engine and aerodynamics together contribute to overall performance.
MOBILITY – Intelligent and autonomous vehicles
Illustrating the main concepts of road vehicles, with special focus on the suspension, tyres, brakes, different propulsion systems (traditional, hybrid and electric) and self-driving technologies. With ad hoc experiments on remote control models, students will understand the effects of varying the parameters that influence the behaviour of the vehicle. In the second part of the camp, students will be able to conduct experiments in autonomous navigation on scale models with laser sensors to detect obstacles, motion sensors and a microprocessor to control the vehicle. Students will also have the chance to understand the ‘automatic’ logic with which a vehicle can move by itself, with an emphasis on how the information measured by the various sensors is processed and used in real time.
ROBOTICS – Robotics: the art of intelligent motion
This course introduces participants to the concepts of robots and programming. Different challenging questions include: What is a robot? What movements can it make? How can we describe its motion? How can we make it move the way we want? And… What does programming a robot mean? This course will provide the basic tools for answering these questions. Participants will also have the chance to programme a real robot and to observe the results of their programming.
CODING – Python, a language for inventors of worlds
This course presents Python, a powerful language for exploration and programming that will offer students interesting possibilities: programming objects around them, imitating certain aspects of human intelligence, writing videogames, creating images, synthesising music. But above all, they will get to know a powerful way to broaden their thinking and will have a clearer idea of what can be done with computers.
TechCamp@POLIMI, which stems from an idea by two Politecnico di Milano professors, Silvia Strada and Mara Tanelli, and by Francesca Sibella, is organised by the Politecnico di Milano in collaboration with Fondazione Politecnico.