Baby Monkeys At Basel Zoo; Basel Stadt To Allow Multi Language Teaching; Hackathon Gets Big Virtual Crowds

News For 7 April 2020

Under the circumstances it seems hard to appreciate that Spring has arrived in earnest. A time when people usually flood the outdoors, having endured winter.  Basel Zoo is no exception - despite the virus headlines, some good news from the Zolli.  In early March two spider monkeys were born.  The monkeys are still too young to have their gender identified, and as a result have yet to be named by the zookeepers.  In addition to the monkeys, a baby Somali Wild Donkey was also born this season - the colt name Rehani is the prize of this year's animal litter as she is part of the zoo's conservation breeding program.  Only 200 of the Wild Donkey species remain in the wild.

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In the canton of Basel-Stadt, teachers will soon have more leeway in choosing their classrooms' teaching materials. From the 2020/21 school year, teaching material freedom will not only be available in the subject of mathematics, but also for French and English. The education council decided that teachers could choose from several teaching aids for teaching in the two foreign languages in the future, according to an announcement on Monday by the education department of the canton Basel-Stadt . The freedom to use teaching aids for mathematics had already been decided in February.

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The weekend saw 5000 people stretching from Hawaii to India congregate online in a hackathon called Versus Virus to solve issues which have arisen from the global Pandemic, Coronavirus. The initiative was an attempt to solve over 100 local challenges through online discussion and solutions, such as creating online playgrounds for children stuck in quarantine, and how to stabilize the economy as quickly as possible once the Pandemic slows down. This was supported by the Swiss government, who had over 50 sponsors funding the event, including FC Zürich and Logitech. Furthermore, the Versus Virus team provided participants with resources and mentors which could be used in order to be successful within the process. Additionally, technological classes, updates on what specific teams were doing, pitching methods, how to find inspiration and so much more were also available.