The School Laboratory of Kempten University of Applied Sciences opened its doors in July 2015 to school classes from the 9th grade up. The focus of the Laboratory is on human sensory perception, i.e. the senses which we use to perceive ourselves and the world around us. Students can discover this topic in the School Laboratory by means of clearly structured and astonishing experiments.
For a few hours, the girls and boys can slip into the role of a scientist or an engineer. Exciting experiments playfully convey modern insights from the world of physics, physiology and psychology. Furthermore, the school students can find out about the research and teaching that takes place at Kempten University of Applied Sciences.
The experiments in the basic program deal with seeing and hearing. Here, young people learn how the eye forms an image, how difficult it is to draw a triangle and to learn when wearing reverse image glasses, as well as how and why optical illusions deceive us.
Fascinating color effects are seen by the students when they look at the pixels of their smartphones under the microscope, or when they produce colors themselves through the additive mixture of light or when they generate colorful shadows.
By determining their own auditory threshold curves, the students get to know the limits of their personal hearing ability. At other acoustic stations, they break up their voice into frequency ranges and analyze the spectrum of the harmonic oscillations.
As a project such as the School Laboratory is not foreseen in the budget of the university and is based on the personal initiative of a highly committed professor, external financial support was necessary. The Frank Hirschvogel Foundation is supporting the project for a duration of four years.
The support of projects such as the School Laboratory, which generates synergies between schools and universities, is of great importance to the Foundation in compensating for the locational disadvantage of its partner schools.
