Oldest Dutch Technological University Stays Up to Date

TU Delft, established in 1842, is the largest and oldest Dutch technological university and considered to be among the world's most prestigious universities of engineering and technology. TU Delft hosts over 19,000 students and more than 3,300 scientists.

The TU Delft is a historic Legrand customer with many large Projecta, Chief and Da-Lite installations, integrated by Hecla Professional & Audio Video Systems. Piet van der Zanden, Adviser for AV-IT in Education at the university showed us many of these installation on the vast campus and buildings. Piet is an expert in integrating AV technology in a learning environment, which can be seen on his blog.

“The TU Delft work closely together with Hecla on getting the best AV results into their rooms,” said Jeroen Helms, Senior Sales Manager. “They have high standards in the products they work with and for them to continuously choose our projection screens and mounting solutions makes us a proud manufacturer and this university a very large showroom.”

One of the installations to notice is the “Next generation classroom” where as an advanced teaching system they introduced the combination of virtual chalk and four parallel video signals. This includes a 4K projector on a Da-Lite Series 300 with HD Progressive where the 4K image was split in 4 FullHD images to show the teachers content, the live writing on a touch-display and a live camera feed of the teacher’s content from a camera in the room.

“Chalkboard pedagogy is still going strong within higher education,” said Piet van der Zanden. “It makes students clear how reasoning takes place instead of just presenting facts. The instructor simultaneously produces and writes arguments in successive order on the board while thinking aloud. This is to visualize the reasoning so students see the process and structure of the step-by-step arguments to recognize patterns and interconnections.”

Another set of rooms to notice are the CTRL-SHIFT-ENTER halls where in each room a Projecta Tensioned Descender with HD Progressive material is installed, and the projector is mounted with the Chief VCMU. This room even made the cover of the 2017 Projecta catalog.