The canteen

The canteen of Fontys Tilburg is a place where you can find me a couple times a day. I like to get a cup of coffee from there in between my lessons. Sometimes I wish we were at Fontys Eindhoven where a cup of coffee is half the price. That would save a lot of money in a year. Another bad part of the canteen are the opening hours. There is no better way to start the day than with a cup of coffee, but in the early morning, when my first lesson starts at half past 8 or half past 9, the canteen is closed. Luckily there are coffee machines in some hallways as well!

Besides these negative matters of the canteen, there are also some positive things. For example: when I forget my lunch, the canteen will save my day. I go there to buy a delicious hamburger and a cup of soup. They also offer very good sandwiches, which can be composed however you want it. You can also go for a snack. They usually provide several Dutch sausages. The soups are also very good. They usually have two different soups on a day. Which soups? Every day, that’s a surprise for me!

Rudy Rutgers
Jos Vromans

Public Transport…

First off, a little warning: this blog isn’t all cheerful about the busses between Tilburg CS and Stappegoor. Actually I hate it very much.

This is what happens all the time when you’re waiting for bus 1 or 11, and when one of the two finally shows up: The bus is so incredibly crowded with students who all want to go to school that when the bus is full, a lot of students are still outside waiting. But when the next bus arrives, there are as many people again as there were when the first bus arrived.

The way back isn’t any better. Because when you travel back to the station, the bus has to drive a whole circle through the bus station often blocked by another bus or a stoplight before it finally stops. Why doesn’t it just stop at the exit places? Because in my opinion, they are specifically made for people to exit the bus and catch their connection with a train or another bus.

I tell you we need more busses, only when it’s crowded with students. There will be more workplaces for bus drives and more students who can go to school on time without all of the stress at the bus station. Win-win situation, don’t you think?

Timon Woordes
Bart van Broekhoven

Promo-team

We, Ramon and Rob, write our blog about the promo-team of Fontys LerarenOpleiding Tilburg (FLOT).

We are in second year of our study Mathematics and Applications where we have to fill in one free study point. To complete this task we joined the promo-team of FLOT. This is a team that promotes FLOT; mostly in high schools by doing short presentations.

Before we are allowed to go to a high school we have to follow certain trainings. These trainings are given by Eric Verouden. These trainings help us to be more confident at giving presentations.

The first training we had was called “the sandwich training”. The whole promo-team came together and we exercised a few strange situations that can happen when you’re giving a presentation. This was really helpful, because now we know how to handle these situations in a polite way.

When we where done with the training there was a dinner with sandwiches and a lot more. This gave us the opportunity to get to know each other and get to know about the other study’s at FLOT.

The next training is called “the pepernoot training” and will take place on the first of December.


Ramon Vossen and Rob Francken

Kongregate

Have you ever been bored in class? Now we have got a solution for you. You can play a different variety of games on Kongregate.

Kongregate is a site where you can play free games. You can create an account and the site saves your scores. It doesn’t matter on which computer you play. And that’s easy when you have to switch classes and need to play on a different computer.

You can play different kinds of games. For example you can play a shooter or an adventure game. But there are far more different genres like action, multiplayer, strategy and puzzle.

Kongregate also brings you a big variety of achievements on all kinds of games. Only the games which people liked best get some achievements to conquer. An achievement is an extra goal to achieve in game. Of course not all achievements compare to each other in terms of difficulty. You have easy, medium, hard and impossible achievements. An easy achievement only gives you five points, whereas a medium achievement already gives you fifteen points. A hard achievement rewards you with an amount of thirty points and though impossible achievements are rare, they do exist and give you a grand total of sixty points. But be warned: Kongregate is not responsible for any keyboard or mouse damage that will occur while attempting impossible achievements!

Depending on the amount of points you have in total you will be given a level. The amount of points you need to go to the next level increases when you are on a higher with each level. The highest possible level is sixty-five. And there are plenty of nerds who made it to level sixty-five.

Now you know what Kongregate is. We use it mostly as a tool against boredom during different computer lessons. Now I hear you thinking: what does this have to do with mathematics and applications? The answer is simple. Lots of games include simple puzzles and during projects we need to solve big puzzles. With the simple puzzles you create a thinking pattern which helps you with big puzzles. And luckily for us, it is kind of fun to do.

That’s it for today. Let’s all make an account on Kongregate and earn some achievements and start your quest to the godlike level of sixty-five.

Rory Tans, Ralf Geelen

Fresh air!

Hello everybody! First of all I would like to thank you for visiting this site. I´m going to tell you about the experiences I had while traveling by train. I have to travel each day to get to my school and fifty percent of the journey is by train. I spend forty-five minutes in that train. Trust me; there are a lot of unusual things that can happen within this time.

The first thing I would like to tell you about is something that happened at the beginning of this school year. I was waiting until I arrived at my destination. Just watching the cows go by. Cows that were black and white, or brown and white or even a combination of black, brown and white! Anyway back to the story. Suddenly a man asks if he can sit next to me. There weren’t many empty seats left, so I let him sit next to me. By the time he’s all settled I noticed he was sweaty. Normally, this is not a problem, if you're sweaty you use a neat invention called deodorant! But unfortunately for me this invention was unknown to this man. So next to me it smelled like milk gone sour. As if this wasn't bad enough the next thing he does is to grab a hand fan and use it in my direction. Where I was first watching cows, I was now having the smell of their product gone bad in my nose. All in all quite a lovely experience for the person who likes nature a lot. But in this case, as a student, I'll pass. After nearly succumbing to this smell, I realized my stop was near. I never thought air could smell this fresh!

Here take a look at this little video about a guy in an interview. Watch his shirt! The guy from the train was almost worse.

Coffee @ Fontys

A lot of people drink coffee. Most of them can’t even function without their daily boost of caffeine. Especially students need their coffee, just to stay awake during class. Luckily, the coffee and tea are really cheap at the Fontys canteen, only 40 cents.

However, since two weeks there’s been a major change. The canteen now opens at 10 am instead of 8.30 am. That means the students can’t buy coffee before the morning classes. There are coffee vending machines in the hallways, but that coffee doesn’t taste as good as the canteen’s coffee.

So, how to solve the coffee problem?

Thank God, Albron once again saves the day. At the canteen, there now is a so called coffee corner, which opens at 8.30am. The coffee and tea are almost four times the normal price, but hey, it’s made with extra love. The coffee is ground from special beans, so that explains why the coffee would be twice as expensive. It’s definitely not worth four times the former price. The tea, however, is still the same. Same water, same tea bags, but four times as expensive.

That leaves students with no other option than to bring their own coffee, tea bags and sugar and buy hot water from the coffee vending machines until the canteen opens.

Until the coffee and tea are cheaper, we’ll boycott the coffee corner!

By Elke Groos and Kim Went

Communication, what's that?

Students from the study Business and Applied Mathematics have a course each year in the first three years of their four year study. During this course they learn how to be a chairman in a meeting. They learn how to get in contact with companies. Communication covers a wide area. So what do the students learn when they are following this course?

In the first year, they learn how to get in contact with a company. They have to ask someone from the company to give a presentation for all the students. So you learn how to approach someone from a company. You have to use formal language. When the person from the company comes to your school you have to guide him around. You have to make an announcement to your class who he is. You thank him afterwards.

During meetings, you learn how to be a chairman. The chairman makes an agenda so there is structure during the meeting, he guides the meeting. He has to make sure that people don't talk when someone is already talking. Another function that has to be fulfilled during a meeting is the function of secretary. The secretary makes notes of the things everybody says. Afterwards the secretary makes a document so everyone can read what the meeting was about.

During all this you learn how to write correctly in Dutch. That's important if you're going to work in a company later. When you are doing all this you get feedback from you're fellow students. You also give feedback to them.

This is just the first year. In the years that follow you learn how to apply for a job, work on your English and how to make contact with an English company. So you learn a lot during those years.

But you want to know more? Come and visit us in Tilburg!