Eight students from Colegiul National Emil Racovita Cluj-Napoca (CNER), accompanied by their teachers (Ariana Vacaretu and Monica Cotul) and their researcher (Lorand Parajdi) were part of the 7-day learning activity organized by Lycée d’Altitude de Briançon (France).
During the week, the students immersed in French Language, French culture, French lessons and universal mathematics.
“On Tuesday, I’ve been in three science lessons. I enjoyed a lot as I did, together with French peers, chemistry experiments. At home, we have few opportunities to do science experiments as the teaching approach is more theoretical”. (Flavia)
“After school, we had a lot of fun with our French hosts. In one evening, we went sleighing – as it was real winter in the French Alps.” (Andrei)
“During the guided tour, we found out a lot of information about Cité Vauban Briançon – a very well preserved medieval city.” (Alexandra)
“After studying the shape of the bells from the Briançon’s Collégiale (church) for almost one school year I was really happy to see them in reality.” (Vlad)
During the first four days of the exchange, Romanian and French students spent some time to finalize both the plenary, and the interactive presentation of their research results. In the last three days, the Romanian students and their French peers participated in the MATh.en.JEANS Lyon Congress. The Congress was a great opportunity for the students to develop interactive communication (about mathematics/ the research work) skills, oral scientific communication (about mathematics/ the research work) skills, and language skills (French and English). During the Congress, the students enjoyed sharing their research work and results and learned a lot of math.
“The best part of the Lyon Congress was Pierre Dehornoy’s presentation Magic Tricks and Graph Theory. It was an inspiring presentation – I’ve learned a lot from both the content of the presentation, and its delivery.” (Dragos)
Both the preparation of the presentations, and the presentations themselves gave opportunity to each student to raise awareness of the achieved results (by himself, by his group or the twin group) and to reorganise the new knowledge related to both the content and the process of the research.
“In the Forum, we discussed with a researcher who wanted to learn about our research results. He asked a question which gave us an excellent idea about a geometrical representation we didn’t think about.” (Ioana and Maria)
All in all, the experience was successful and very enjoyable and we all have come home with new things that we have learned or experienced and will stay with us for a long time.
“It was a very beautiful experience. I’m very happy that I had had that experience and I hope that I will have that opportunity again.” (Amos)
