Emily, Katharina and Johann report on their experiences
The Girls' and Boys' Day could take place this year, but partly virtually because of the pandemic. Emily from Year 7 took part and was allowed to get a taste of the profession of a fire protection engineer at hhpberlin online:
"Under the title "A day with fire protectors - buildings under the magnifying glass", there were insights into the work of the company for me on that day.
I was shown what fire protection planning is and how fire plans for buildings are drawn up. Mathematics was also a topic: for example, how fire spreads with the help of calculation. After a lively break, we continued with FUTURA - the city of the future, where you can become a virtual resident. People from near and far are already living and working together there, exchanging and developing ideas for a safe city. The tour continued with hands-on experiments.
At the end, what I liked best were the tips and tricks in communication. Here it was explained and shown how best to conduct conversations. For me, it was a very interesting day in an exciting company with many great people who clearly showed and explained everything about fire protection and safety.
Katharina and Johann were at the iRights.Lab:
"The iRights.Lab is a think tank that deals with topics related to digitalisation and its consequences for our society.
At 9 a.m. our day at the Lab began with a guided tour of the house. We saw the individual offices of the different departments, a podcast booth, the kitchen and the large hall "Palazzo" - with a large TV, a table tennis table and a grand piano. We found the Palazzo particularly beautiful. It is used for presentations and workshops, for example.
The working day began with a morning meeting, where we introduced ourselves and got to know some of the staff, and everyone told us their highlight of the day. Ludwig from the communication department then told us something about everyday life at the Lab, what a Think Thank is and what the work is about.
In the afternoon, we were allowed to meet and interview Philipp and Anja, which we found very interesting. Philipp told us, for example, how he worked in a plastic bag factory to finance his driving licence and eventually came to found iRights.Lab. He also told us that he was kicked out of grammar school because of an F in French and later studied law. The interview was very exciting, interesting and also a bit funny.
We also met Loki, the office dog, which we liked very much.
In the afternoon we were allowed to attend a meeting where a new project was presented: The "AI Label", which has to do with Artificial Intelligence. It was our longest meeting of the day.
In the next meeting, we were introduced to "Haterebel", a mobile game. The game is about hate speech. The game is supposed to teach you how to deal with hate comments on the internet, for example. We were allowed to look at and listen to the first drafts and sounds of the game and give a few tips on what we think is important in a game. We also talked about games in general, for example, whether we think advertising or in-app purchases are better or whether you have to buy the game first to download it.
Our last meeting was the funniest: we met "the best department in the world", the communication department. The staff of the communication department created a Kahoot quiz for us about our day at the Lab and what we learned there, which we then all played together.
At the end of the long exciting day, we were allowed to play table tennis in the Palazzo. The day was a lot of fun and very interesting. We learned many things we didn't know before and got a good insight into the daily work at iRights.Lab. We were very happy that we were also allowed to come despite Corona."
