Last week, the Living Lab in Dresden joined two events to support pupils in developing and strengthening their AI competence: the Junior Engineer Academy and the TUD Future Days.

Junior Engineer Academy

From June 8–12, 2026, the block week of the Tschirnhaus Gymnasium Dresden for the Junior Engineering Academy took place. On June 9, we opened our Living Lab to about 15 pupils, who gained an exciting insight into the world of AI. Under the title “Build Your Own AI Application,” the pupils worked in small groups to train a neural network to classify images for the game Rock-Paper-Scissors. The pupils participated with great curiosity and enthusiasm, gaining practical insight into how AI works.

TUD Future Days: AI Competence Days 2026

On June 11, 2026, ScaDS.AI Dresden/Leipzig also participated in the TUD Future Days: AI Competence Days 2026. The AI Competence Days offered interested participants the opportunity to delve deeply into AI. With a variety of workshops and practical insights, pupils had the chance to strengthen their AI competence and get their questions answered.

During our 90-minute workshop “How Words Become Numbers”, we took participants on a brief journey through the history of natural language processing. Together, we explored the following questions:

• How does a computer actually handle language and text?
• What is the foundation of modern language models like ChatGPT?

We started with the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm. From Cinderella to Rumpelstiltskin, we examined which words particularly shape a fairy tale and how this can be expressed mathematically. Ultimately, we arrived at Word2Vec – an early example of word embeddings, in which words become vectors in a semantic space. The idea of translating language into vectors remains central to modern language models to this day.

The participants were fully engaged and asked some fascinating questions. Many thanks to TUD Dresden University of Technology for organizing the event and to everyone who attended.

Visit the Living Lab

The Living Lab is your place to experience AI and get in contact with our researchers. It approaches research topics, such as Artificial Intelligence, Big Data, and Data Science, in a diverse and vibrant way. This experiment space was created to share current and topical research approaches and results of our center with visitors. If you would like to visit our Living Lab, you can join our upcoming events in Dresden:

• OUTPUT.DD (June 25, 2026)
• Dresden Science Night (June 26, 2026)