This year's Future Day offered a good 30 schoolgirls in grades 5-10 the opportunity to get a taste of Computing Science and its associated applications in an experimental form.

The programme included a showcase lecture entitled "Why do autonomous robots never get lost, why are robots becoming doctors' best friends and why does it all work down to the smallest detail?", in which a wide range of control engineering applications were illustrated using examples such as parking assistants for vehicles, fully autonomous navigation, energy technology applications and robotics in the field of manufacturing and medical assistance systems. This showcase lecture, jointly organised by the departments of Distributed Control in Networked Systems, Microrobotics and Control Engineering and Assistance Systems and Medical Technology (FK VI), led on to the "Laboratory visits Pendulum, hovering, driving: We control it!" and "Looking at extremely small things with special microscopes". Here, hands-on experiments on the positioning of floating spheres in magnetic fields, experiments on the pendulum damping of crane loads, obstacle detection for robots on a model scale and experiments on electron microscopy managed to awaken the students' spirit of research and test the interplay of actuators and sensors in control engineering applications for themselves.

In addition, schoolgirls in the department Didactics of Computing Science were able to programme pieces of jewellery themselves. After a brief introduction to programming with Processing, the girls designed and programmed their own patterns. Simple commands for drawing lines, rectangles, circles or arcs were used to create smileys, hearts and other patterns for earrings or necklace pendants. The proud participants were then able to cut their designs using a laser cutter and can now wear their creations as jewellery themselves!

We are already looking forward to Future Day 2024 and would especially like to thank the students who actively supported us with the supervision.