Of sounds and numbers
What is a sound? And how does it get into the computer? On 8 March, 60 pupils were able to learn from Prof. Dr. Jan-Torsten Milde how music can be made with the PC. He was actively and powerfully supported by his assistant Elisabeth Milde - who set the tone right at the beginning with the Star Wars intro. Almost all the children reported playing an instrument themselves. So there were experts among themselves: What is an oscillogram, what is frequency and amplitude? And: What does all this have to do with the computer?
Prof. Milde showed the young pop music talents how to "tinker with tones". He encouraged them to get to work themselves - and gave examples from "groovy" (100bpm) to "disco" (sound effect "Hoover"). When the children were finally allowed to work on what they had sung themselves, even the last ones were convinced: with "four-on-the-floor", the lecture hall becomes a dance palace!
8 March 2017: Prof. Dr Jan-Torsten Milde: Making music with the computer: How does it work?
In his lecture on 15 March, Prof. Dr Kreiker started with the lives of the visitors: Almost all of the 8- to 12-year-olds reported that they use platforms like Facebook and Snapchat. But how do these programmes manage to find exactly what they are looking for from the huge stores of data? The answer surprised the children quite a bit: with mathematics!
With the help of an experiment, Jörg Kreiker explained how binary searching works. "Ladies" and "boys" competed against each other to find exactly the number 74 out of 31 numbered and sorted cups - and later calculated that with only 20 attempts, one can identify the right one in 1 million cups. The sorting net stuck up with masking tape in front of the lecture hall also caused aha moments: Here, four children could be sorted by size in simple steps and comprehensible to all - and everyone wanted to try this out again in the end. Prof. Dr. Kreiker was able to inspire the Children's University students to solve mathematical problems - and rightly earned them a round of applause.
15 March 2017: Prof. Dr. Jörg Kreiker: More than programming: On searching and sorting in computer science
