Ela investigates fake news, Kuba cooks and bakes, and Snezhana built her own compressed-air engine. What they all share is a passion for what they do, even though they started from scratch in fields they initially knew little about. Their stories, along with presentations by other teams and individuals, were featured at the JUNIOR Conference, a forum for sharing experience and networking across disciplines.
When Snezhana Nabokova travelled from Znojmo to Brno on Friday, 27 March, to the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering, the journey was already a familiar one. She had previously taken part twice in the strojLAB Challenge competition with her team. This time, however, she came on her own to speak at the JUNIOR Conference and share her experience with her SOČ project—the Czech Secondary School Professional Activity, in which students voluntarily develop a specialised topic, project, or piece of research beyond their regular coursework.
Snezhana was inspired by the faculty competition Pneuracer and decided to build a compressed-air car equipped with an engine and components of her own design. “I was fascinated by alternative propulsion systems such as hydrogen, electricity, CNG, and compressed air. I studied and compared them from different perspectives, including infrastructure, which ultimately tends to be the main reason why some alternative energy sources, despite all their advantages, are still not used more widely,” says the secondary school student, whose project advanced to the regional round of the competition.
Even from her confident presentation, it is clear that through her work she has become highly knowledgeable in design and engineering—and has truly fallen in love with the field. “I would love to study here at the faculty. I want to be an engineer, and I would really love to contribute to the technological future with my ideas,” she adds.
A Lesson in Chemistry
Jakub Malota, who spoke second, comes from a completely different world—quite literally one of dough and batter. “While the world came to a halt during the pandemic, my journey in the kitchen was only just beginning. What started as an amateur attempt to beat boredom grew into a passion for cooking, baking, and pastry-making,” says Jakub. And he has one message for the audience: “Don’t be afraid to mess it up!” He studies IT at secondary school and enjoys it very much. But his passion for cooking gives him a chance to switch into an entirely different mode. “Cooking and baking are a form of relaxation for me. Once I get into it, I lose track of time. It’s a completely different universe,” he said during his presentation.
But work in the kitchen is science too, says Jakub, who now invents his own recipe variations and therefore needed to understand some of the chemical principles behind cooking and baking. “That’s why people are often surprised when they make the same recipe three times and it turns out differently each time. They overlook some connection that is crucial to the final result,” adds Jakub, who concluded his successful presentation with an equally successful tasting session.
Ela Doležalová presented the audience with a much more serious topic: the relationship between social media use and the ability to recognise disinformation. She studied this phenomenon among lower secondary school pupils and is now working on the development of an educational online game called SENTRYLA, designed to help students use social media more safely. “I’m incredibly interested in this topic, especially because it is so current—for example in the context of efforts to limit or even ban social media use among young people,” says the third-year student from a grammar school in Pardubice. “One of the questions is whether the right path is restriction, or education instead. I found that if pupils spend less time on social media, the effect of education is much more visible than when they spend a lot of time on it,” Ela concludes.
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The programme also included team presentations and tours of the FME premises (photo: Aneta Brothánková)