József Öveges, the father of experiments – and Mihály Kovács, the forerunner of IT teachers
The Hungarian Province of the Piarist Order and the John von Neumann Computer Society organised a temporary exhibition to pay homage to two Piarist teachers: József Öveges, who was born 120 years ago, and Mihály Kovács, born a hundred years ago.
The exhibition entitled Foresighted Piarists was opened on 24 May 2016 in the building of the Piarist Grammar School in Budapest and can be visited until 30 September 2016. Prior appointment is necessary.
The exhibition recalls the career and personality of the two prominent, school-founding teachers through documents and objects that have rarely been on display.
The two legendary physics teachers adopted revolutionary teaching methods and possessed immense openness towards new generations. Although they completed quite different careers, they both were true representatives of Piarist traditions; they were masters of combining simplicity, usefulness and efficiency as fundamental teaching principles with playfulness and demonstration as teaching tools. Perhaps as a result of their boy scouting background, their creativity also unfolded in practical hands-on and DIY activities. Both of them were convinced that tools necessary for experiments could be produced from scrap or easily available, everyday materials.
József Öveges is an unforgettable personality of experimental physics teaching, generations came to understand and love physics thanks to his educational programmes on Hungarian Television. Mihály Kovács, his younger colleague and later his monographer, taught not only physics, but he was also the first secondary school teacher to teach cybernetics in the Piarist Grammar school. The games he had built with his students took the news of the novel science, the precursor of today's informatics and robotics, to Hungarian homes for the first time.
The life-time work and activities of the two outstanding Piarist teachers are illustrated by plenty of photographs and personal documents at the exhibition. To evoke the spirit of Öveges programmes or the spirit of Fizikum (Physicum), the organisers also wished to refer to the history of technology and science by putting on display tools of experiments used and/or made by József Öveges and Mihály Kovács alongside the legendary cybernetic games. The exhibition includes such extraordinary items as the cybernetic games called Műegér (Artificial Mouse), or Heuréka (Eureka), the "questioning machine" called Didaktomat, and Tücsök (Cricket), the prototype of the Mikromat cybernetic kit, which was the first computer model purchasable in shops. The creator of Tücsök, Ferenc Woynarovich, a Piarist student himself in the 1960s, now physicist at the Wigner Research Centre for Physics of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, shared his personal memories at the opening of the exhibition on 24 May.
The Hungarian Province of the Piarist Order and the John von Neumann Computer Society (NJSZT) respects the exceptional value József Öveges and Mihály Kovács created through their life-time work and activities. Mihály Kovács is among the greatest contributors to Hungarian computer science, whose accomplishments are displayed at the world-standard permanent Exhibition on IT History organised by NJSZT in Szeged.
The Budapest exhibition Foresighted Piarists was an initiative in the collaboration of the Piarist Order and NJSZT that aimed at preserving and popularising the life-time achievements of Mihály Kovács. Later this year, Mihály Kovács will be paid tribute to at NJSZT's exhibition in Szeged, which presents foreseen history of computer science or "the past of the future".
Hungarian Province of the Piarist Order – John von Neumann Computer Society.
piarista.hu; njszt.hu; ajovomultja.hu