Sutton Trust summer school
S5/Year 12 pupils experience life as an Informatics student.
The University of Edinburgh Sutton Trust Summer School took place 3-8 July 2016, with nine participants attending workshops run by Informatics. It is the third year in which the School has taken part in the initiative, as part of the University’s widening participation programme. The Sutton Trust Summer School aims to give UK pupils in S5/Year 12 experience of student life. Attendees select two academic subjects from a wide choice on offer, and take part in a host of social activities.
Workshops
Informatics staff and postgraduate students ran a variety of workshops, looking at questions such as:
- How do you automate guessing how many sweets in a packet? Is an email spam or not-spam? How do you know if a medical image is of normal cells or cancerous cells? (Data science and machine learning workshop)
- How does Google Translate instantly translate between over 80 languages, when computers may not actually know much about language? (Machine translation workshop)
- How do companies track people as they move between pages on the Internet? What can you do to protect yourself and your personal data? (Security and privacy on the Internet)
- How can you easily build computer games and simple programs (using Scratch, a visual programming language)? (Game maker's guide to software engineering)
- Currently robots can do tasks which help us with space exploration, house cleaning and driving cars. How do robots gain information about their environment and act accordingly - eg. how can you program a lego robot to follow lines? (Robot line following)
The Sutton Trust Summer School is a great opportunity for students from a variety of backgrounds to experience what life at university might be like - from playing with robots, to protecting themselves on the web, to the huge number of societies and clubs students can join.