Teaching

The notion of excellence has multiple, diverse facets. What forms does it take in education? How do we attain it and what impact does it have on prospective and current EPFL students? A conversation with two EPFL Associate Vice Presidents, Kathryn Hess Bellwald, in charge of Student Affairs and Outreach, and Pierre Dillenbourg, in charge of Education, explores these intertwined questions.

The Federal Council has instructed the ETH Domain to increase the proportion of women in the natural and technical sciences. But how is that to be done? 

The EPFL Rocket Team was crowned champion at this year’s European Rocketry Challenge (EuRoC) in Ponte de Sor, Portugal. Now in its second year, this competition held by the Portuguese Space Agency brought together 19 teams from across Europe.

Following the pilot project at the Hönggerberg campus, ETH Zurich is opening a Student Project House on its Zentrum campus. Students can now make their ideas a reality, in the heart of Zurich, and away from the pressure of grades. At their disposal are 1,200 square metres of renovated space, distributed across five floors.

EPFL’s Bernoulli Center has now become the Bernoulli Center for Fundamental Studies, with a broader scope including theoretical computer science and theoretical physics. The Center’s focus will also be on education, outreach and on fostering collaborations within the EPFL campus.

An EPFL architecture student’s radical new approach to the layout of typical city-center buildings in Lausanne, and how we inhabit the spaces we live in, may just revolutionize our ways of thinking.

Starting September 17, 2021, EPFL Pavilions will host an exceptional exhibition, "Deep Fakes: Art and Its Double". Organised by EPFL and University of Lausanne, using artificial intelligence and the latest scientific imaging technologies, it immerses the public in the depths of artistic and cultural doubles.

EPFL and HEAD researchers have set-up an installation to raise awareness around the importance of exposure to natural light for human health and the role of the architecture in urban settings in modulating that light. The exhibition will take part in the Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism this fall 2021.

Swissloop Tunneling, a team of students from ETH Zurich and other universities, has won second place in a tunnelling competition hosted by Elon Musk in Las Vegas. Their tunnelling machine has also won the Innovation & Design Award.

At the start of the 2020 fall semester, a group of EPFL students set up the EPFL Xplore association with the goal of building a rover from scratch. Their vehicle, named Argos, will compete in this weekend's European Rover Challenge – Europe's most prestigious competition dedicated to mobile robots. 

EPFL has recently brought an innovative heating plant online and will soon connect it to a large data center. The plant will help the Ecublens campus optimize how it generates and consumes energy, with the goal of achieving carbon neutrality.

Researchers from ETH Zurich have demonstrated the positive effects of productive failure on learning outcomes. The success rate for one of ETH’s largest courses was increased by 20 percent.

Apprentices play a little-known but essential role in science made in Switzerland. Here, we take a look at young people who are being trained in the institutions in the ETH Domain.

Marion Höhener, 19, has completed her training as a physics laboratory assistant at Empa this summer. She wants to make research her career and is already looking towards higher education.

After finishing high school, Rohat Sihyürek joined PSI as an apprentice polymechanic. There, the 20-year-old manufactured high-precision parts that are essential for Switzerland's largest research facilities.