Alongside the virtual campus, the Collider is at the heart of our European University. The challenge-based learning competitions encourage mixed teams to explore specific subjects together and work on innovative projects.
In research, scientists use a collider to accelerate elementary particles (atoms, electrons, neutrons, etc…) to very high energy, provoking them to impact other particles to experiment, discover or validate new theories and transform matter. The EuroTeQ Collider aims to build on this mechanism: connecting participants with different profiles and personalities to boost creativity, innovation, shared understanding, enabling them to imagine new approaches, design disruptive solutions, and create prototypes to meet the respective challenge.
As students and professionals work together in a joint effort, all participants not only improve their technical skills, but also enhance their soft skills such as team spirit, flexibility to work in multicultural environments, and design thinking, so important in professional life.
How does the Collider work?
A committee of professors and researchers defines the overarching topics to be addressed by the future teams. In a second step, students express their interests within these themes, while industry partners and stakeholders specify the viability requirements. Based on this “swarm of ideas”, several challenges are designed and participants invited to explore different aspects of a specific problem, develop solutions, test and validate tools, and create prototypes of their solutions.
For the duration of each Collider, participants can call on advice and mentorship within the EuroTeQ network for their projects and attend courses and conferences. Subsequently a jury selects the winning teams according to predefined criteria.
