Science Day at Amsterdam Science Park 2026

Demonstration Target audience: children ages 6 and up and adults

Would you like to know in advance what’s inside a surprise egg, so you don’t end up with the same little figurine again? We can use X-rays to look inside the egg without opening it! Visit our Flex Ray lab, where we’ll scan a surprise egg for you.

We'll also show you how to use X-rays to "read" a closed book, how to determine the age of a wooden artwork, and whether your apple is rotten on the inside. And all of that with just a little math!

Activity
Target audience: children ages 7 and up and adults

Apps like Netflix and YouTube have thousands—sometimes even millions—of videos to choose from. But how do they know which videos you're likely to like?

Dive into the world of algorithms and discover how apps try to predict what you want to watch. And the best part: you get to come up with and build your own algorithm!

Activity
Target audience: children and adults

There are three cups upside down. A surprise is waiting for you under one of the cups. You have to guess which cup it's under.

You take a guess, but the game host wants to help you and gives you a hint. The big question is: “Will you stick with your first choice, or would it be smarter to change it after all?”

Try it for yourself with our cups and see if your intuition matches what the probability calculations show. A surprising experiment where luck, choices, and math come together!

Activity: A real brain teaser!
Target audience: children ages 14 and up and adults

Imagine you're standing at a bus stop. You don't know exactly when the bus will arrive, but you do know that, on average, it comes twice an hour. The question is, “How long will you have to wait, on average?” Half an hour? Fifteen minutes? Or maybe something else? It's a real brainteaser!

Activity
Target audience: children and adults

In life-threatening situations where every second counts, it’s crucial to have an ambulance nearby. Math can help ensure that ambulances are always strategically deployed, so there’s one nearby when it’s really needed. Will you lend us a hand?

Activity
Target audience: children ages 8 and up and adults

Retro games are old video games that used to be popular. Think of games like Pac-Man or Galaga. These games are still fun to play, even though they’re much simpler than today’s games. The first algorithms (“programming recipes”) in retro games ensured that the limited memory and small storage capacity of that era were used as efficiently as possible. These techniques laid the foundation for modern games. In our demo, you can play a few of these classics yourself!

Did you know that the first quantum computers are already being built? At CWI, scientists are working on the software and algorithms needed for today’s prototypes as well as the powerful quantum computers of the future. No prior knowledge is required.

Program a quantum computer

Activity
Target audience: children ages 8 and up and adults

Discover how a qubit works: a unique building block that can be both 0 and 1 at the same time. You’ll get hands-on with a life-size qubit that you control using an Xbox controller. Can you figure out the right step-by-step plan to make the qubit perform the calculation correctly?

Sorting Weights — What Is the Smartest Sorting Algorithm?

Activity
Target audience: children ages 10 and up and adults

Can you arrange the weights in order, from light to heavy? Some methods work faster than others. Find out which algorithm gets you to the solution the fastest. Can you solve all the puzzles?

Quantum technology… but as a game!

3 games. 1 arcade. Discover quantum physics through play!

Step into the world of quantum technology and play three surprising arcade games:

Quantris
Tetris, but quantum
Build your way through superposition, measurements, and entanglement.

PongQ
Pong with a quantum twist
Play with quantum states and discover the strange world of quantum mechanics.

Bloch Invaders
Space Invaders, but quantum
Defend your spaceship and discover the world of quantum states.

Play, explore, and learn—on your own or together!

Activity
Target audience: children ages 8 and up and adults

At Cryptris, you’ll dive into the world of secret scripts and codes, presented in a game format inspired by the popular Tetris. Stop by and race against the computer: who will be the first to decipher the secret message? With this game, you’ll learn how encryption works while having fun. No prior knowledge required—just the joy of solving puzzles.

This activity is also available in English and French

Activity:
Target audience: Children ages 8 and up and adults

In this activity, you’ll get to work with classic secret writing systems and code languages. By solving a series of puzzles, you’ll discover not only how to create a secret code, but also how to try to crack one. The puzzles vary in difficulty, so every code-breaker is welcome.

This activity is also available in English

Activity
Target audience: Children ages 4 and up and adults

In this arcade game, you choose which world to simulate: swirl the mouse through a wind current and place windmills in it, stop an epidemic in a mini-city, build dikes against a storm surge, or let a little creature teach itself to walk. Everything is calculated in real time as you play, so you can immediately see the effect of your actions. Discover the math behind the game step by step. These are the same kinds of calculations we use to study wind farms, floods, and epidemics.

This activity is also available in English

"
" Workshop Target audience: children ages 8 and up and adults

When you program, you write statements for the computer using specific words. The computer then carries out exactly what you've written.

Sometimes that's exactly what you meant, but sometimes the computer does something different than you expected. In that case, we call it a bug, and you have to figure out how to fix it.

But what if the programming language itself can't do what you want? In that case, you can extend or modify the language.
How does that work? We can show you!

Whether you've never programmed before or are already really good at it—feel free to stop by. Then we'll figure out together what you'd like to try.

Activity
Target audience: children ages 8 and up and adults

Hexaflagon
A hexaflagon—a fun word, but an intriguing mathematical shape. In this activity, you’ll fold a hexaflagon out of folded triangles that you color yourself. When you flip the hexaflagon, you’ll see three different colored sides.

Folding Puzzle: "
" In this puzzle, you cut out a picture that contains blank spaces and letters. Can you fold the picture to form the correct word?

Activity
Target audience: children ages 8 and up and adults

1001 Nights of Turtles
In this puzzle, you have 9 tiles that you arrange in a 3-by-3 grid to make the turtles in the center match. Simple, right?

Who's afraid of blue, yellow, and red?
This puzzle consists of 9 colored pieces: three blue, three yellow, and three red. Place the colored pieces in the rectangle so that they touch each other. Not even at a corner.

Solving Calcudoku - Math Puzzles
A Calcudoku is a puzzle similar to Sudoku. In a Calcudoku, you have to use logic and do some math. It’s a fun and challenging variation. Can you solve one?

The Great Tantalizer
In this puzzle, you arrange four cubes so that all their sides are different colors. Can you solve this puzzle?

Activities
Target audience: children ages 8 and up and adults

Connect the honeycomb!
In this game, you play against another person. You each choose a color and take turns coloring one of the uncolored squares in the honeycomb. The goal is to form a continuous path in your color that runs diagonally toward your opponent’s side.

Discover the Möbius strip!

In this activity, you'll make a Möbius strip by twisting one end of the strip and then gluing it to the other end. Can you figure out what's so special about the Möbius strip?

Collecting Pencils - Who Gets the Last One?
This game is for two players and uses two stacks of skewers. There are two variations of the game, each with different rules for taking skewers from the stacks, but the ultimate goal remains the same: to be the last one to take a skewer. Can you come up with a strategy?

Building Activity Target audience: children ages 8 and up and adults

In this activity, you'll make a spherical structure out of playing cards. You'll do this by making small cuts in the playing cards so that you can slide them together.

Activity
Target audience: children ages 8 and up and adults

With four blocks, you can build a pyramid. With six blocks, a cube. But what happens when you connect even more blocks together? With Polydron, you can build, combine, and experiment to your heart’s content. What unique shape can you create? Who can build the most beautiful polyhedron?

Activity
Target audience: children ages 8 and up and adults

How do you send a message that no one else is allowed to read? Julius Caesar used a cipher to send messages to his army camps in enemy territory. By cleverly shifting the letters of the alphabet, he was able to conceal his messages.

Find out how the Caesar cipher works and try to decipher the secret message yourself. Can you crack the code?

Outdoor Activity
Target audience: children ages 8 and up and adults

A maze is a network of paths that lead to the goal via detours. Because there are dead-end paths, figuring out the right way is a puzzle, especially if you can only turn in one direction. Can you find your way out of the maze?

Demonstration Target audience: children and adults

Find out how lightning is formed, what it’s used for, and why we study it. Then make your own mini-lightning! But what can we learn from it?

Books are available for purchase at the Epsilon Uitgaven booth. The Zebra series introduces upper-level HAVO/VWO students to topics in mathematics that fall outside the standard curriculum but are well worth exploring. For example, topics such as mathematics and art, mathematics and origami, the mathematics behind the Dutch electoral system, Islamic geometric patterns, and numerous other subjects.

The Giraf Series is a series of publications intended for students and teachers in VMBO and the lower grades of HAVO/VWO. It includes activity books and games on cryptography, working with negative numbers, etc.

For math teachers, we have a book with inspiring ideas for math lessons, or the standard reference: *Didactics of Mathematics*.

Steven Pemberton

This year marks the 35th anniversary of the World Wide Web: on August 6, 1991, Tim Berners-Lee posted a brief summary of the World Wide Web project to an Internet newsgroup, inviting collaborators.

In the meantime, the Web has become an essential part of society. Part of this is that vast amounts of information that used to be available in print are now (only) available electronically. One of the dangers of this is that information owners often treat the data as temporary and delete it once it becomes outdated. As a result, society is at risk of losing large parts of its history.

So it is time to consider how we use the web, how it has been designed, and what we should do to ensure that 100 years from now, we will still be able to access and read what we are producing today.

Please note: This lecture will be in English

Vanessa Evers

We're most familiar with artificial intelligence from computers and phones. But what happens when AI is given a body and starts moving among people as a robot?

A social robot can see, listen, talk, and respond to what people are doing. As a result, a robot can, for example, help children learn, keep the elderly company, or work alongside people in a hospital.

Vanessa Evers explains how researchers are teaching robots to recognize human behavior and take emotions and social rules into account. After all, a smart robot must not only perform the right task, but also understand when to speak, wait, help, or keep its distance.

Can AI, if it has a body, really learn how people interact with one another?

Rob van der Mei

During this presentation, I’ll take you on a journey to the WWW: the Wonderful World of Mathematical Algorithms. It’s an intriguing world that really makes you think. Problems from everyday life that seem simple at first glance turn out, upon closer inspection, not to be as simple as they appear. How long do you have to wait for a bus that comes by, on average, twice an hour? How can I find an empty room in an infinitely large hotel where all the rooms are occupied? Is “infinite” really that infinite, anyway?

Using a number of compelling examples, I will show that there is a whole world hidden behind seemingly simple, “everyday” questions from real-life situations.

Madelon Hulsebos

With the increasing publication of data on the Internet to promote social issues, it is of the utmost importance to ensure that highly sensitive data—which is not intended for the public—is not published on public websites.

In a recent study led by Madelon Hulsebos (CWI) in collaboration with the United Nations (UN), they therefore asked questions such as“What constitutes potentially sensitive data, and is this the same in every situation?” and“How can Artificial Intelligence (AI) help automatically detect and secure sensitive data?”

During this lecture, we will reflect together on these questions using concrete examples from the UN, and Madelon will present a new AI-driven system she developed to detect context-dependent sensitivity in datasets from the United Nations’ data platform, called the Humanitarian Data Exchange (HDX)."

Vanessa Evers

We're most familiar with artificial intelligence from computers and phones. But what happens when AI is given a body and starts moving among people as a robot?

A social robot can see, listen, talk, and respond to what people are doing. As a result, a robot can, for example, help children learn, keep the elderly company, or work alongside people in a hospital.

Vanessa Evers explains how researchers are teaching robots to recognize human behavior and take emotions and social rules into account. After all, a smart robot must not only perform the right task, but also understand when to speak, wait, help, or keep its distance.

Can AI, if it has a body, really learn how people interact with one another?

Please note: This lecture will be held in the ARCNL stairwell.