Key handover at "Lab4u" - a zdi student laboratory in Oberhausen

Since March 2020, the corona pandemic has had Germany and the world, cities, villages, corporations and schools firmly in its grip. The design of everyday life and leisure time is and was not possible without conditions. The Corona crisis clearly shows how important the digitization of many areas of life is.
And it is precisely at this time that the opening of the zdi-Schüler:innenlabors “Lab4u – MINT makes digital” in Oberhausen. The final preparations for the official opening planned for autumn are in full swing. 3D printers are assembled, workshops are planned and computers set up. In the run-up to this, the mayor of Oberhausen, Daniel Schranz, presented a symbolic key to the university president, Prof. Dr.-Ing. Susanne Staude and Prof. Dr. Uwe Handmann, scientific director of the zdi centers in Oberhausen and Bottrop.

"If young people are already able to implement or further develop their creative ideas with digital support of any kind while they are still at school, they may want to continue doing so in the future and decide to study one of the MINT subjects," says Prof. Dr. Susanne Staude is convincing.

With the student laboratory in Marktstraße 148, a shopping street in the center of Oberhausen, the range of services offered by the zdi center in Oberhausen has been expanded once again. A permanent extracurricular place of learning is being created here for trying out and discovering, especially for schoolchildren in grades 7 to 13. The offer includes workshops from the entire MINT area, with the focus on expanding the digitization skills of young people. In addition, teachers can book various workshops for their students in Lab4u. But there are also "free" formats in which young people can use various technical devices at the "Lab4u Afternoon" after prior individual registration. The offer includes, among other things, programming robots, designing app elements or constructing objects and printing them with the 3D printer.

But VR glasses can also be tried out and small virtual worlds can be designed. Furthermore, the topic of sustainability is found again; Experiments on fine dust measurement and the construction of small wind and solar systems are offered.

“We want to show the variety of professional opportunities. Not only academic professions can be digitized, digitization is also becoming more and more evident in craft and nursing professions: a carpenter who first shows her ideas in 3D printing or nursing staff who views patient data with data glasses," explains Prof. Dr. Uwe Handmann.