Operation
Visits to the demonstration classroom
Students from comprehensive schools and upper secondary schools in the Helsinki metropolitan area can visit the TiNA demonstration classroom. Engineering students guid the visits. They tell the pupils about electricity and electrical safety taking the pupils’ ages and background information into account. The students tell about studies at Helsinki University of Technology and about job possibilities for Masters of Science in Technology. The point is to give the teachers information they can circulate to other teachers.
During such visits the pupils do some small electrical installations, for example create electricity with the help of a potato, and a magnet from nails. In the end the students summarize the visit and repeat what the pupils have learnt. Such a visit usually takes approximately ninety minutes depending on the group size. During the last thirty minutes the pupils go to one of the Department’s laboratories. The most popular laboratories have been the cottage lab for applied electronics, listening room for voice processing and acoustics, an echoless room, electrical networks and the Tesla transformer for high-voltage engineering.
Education for teachers
- Electrophysics
- "Lasketaan langasta" teacher´s material
Tinataan project organizes education for elementary school teachers about electrophysics. Engineering student Seppo Mäntylä lectures about the basics of electricity such as electric charge, current and electric energy. Teachers get to do some exercises about the subject also. This kind of education is useful for teachers because physics is a rather new subject in elementary schools.
“Lasketaan langasta” teacher’s material is compiled as special material for mathematics. Exercises support instructing handicrafts, when the aim is to emphasise it’s the systematic and logical aspect. There are also some examples of domestic electric consumption and housekeeping. Illustration of these exercises is imaginary, so they are not suitable as guidelines for students as such, but instruction from teachers is needed.
Tinataan project organizes education for compulsory school teachers about combining mathematics and handicrafts.