Visit to Parque Lage marks the start of IMPA Tech’s cultural program

30/04/2024

A visit to Parque Lage on Sunday (28) marked the start of IMPA Tech students’ cultural activities. Organized by Language Skills teacher Cilene Rodrigues, the visit brought together more than 40 students at the foot of the Tijuca Forest, in the Botanical Garden.

The meeting was an opportunity for the students to exchange experiences and get to know each other better outside the classroom. For 17-year-old Leandro Vieira, the experience was incredible. “My town is in the countryside, so there’s no such thing as visiting parks. We learned about the history of Parque Lage and Rio de Janeiro. Socially speaking, it was a chance to get along with new students and socialize with classmates,” said the student, from Guariba, in the interior of São Paulo.

Listed by IPHAN as a historical and landscape heritage site, Parque Lage was a sugar mill during colonial Brazil. The palace is currently home to the School of Visual Arts. The students saw traces of the country’s history and the local flora and flora.

During the tour, the students were introduced to Professor Cilene’s research on primate vocalization, which seeks to understand human grammar. “I work with types of grammar and structural complexity, an area of research in formal linguistics and computer science. There are grammars with less computational power, which almost nobody studies, creating gaps in the areas of study. The aim of my research is to use less complex data, such as primate vocalizations, to understand the multiple faces of our grammar,” she said.

Anderson Aquiles, from the interior of Pernambuco, thought the initiative was “sensational”. “As well as understanding the history of the Park, we learned about the professor’s research. We learned more about our human language from the simplest systems, like primate language,” he said.

The visit also allowed for a cultural exchange between the students themselves, since the graduating class is made up of people from all regions of Brazil. “As we have such a wide range of regionalities, we got to know more of our classmates and each other’s language. At the end of the tour, we had a picnic and chatted, learning more about our cultures. It was a lot of fun!” concluded the student.

The outing was the students’ first external encounter, but the teacher promises something new. For Cilene, cultural experience is fundamental to training scientists. “We need to give the students a broader knowledge, showing them in practice what the possibilities of science are outside the classroom,” she said.

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