Education Fellows

We already know by now the importance of programming skills. But whenever we think of becoming programmers, we think of learning a programming language or algorithms and data structures. However, a skill that is as important as writing programs is to test those programs, and make sure that they actually work. After all, society depends on working software!

The goal of my fellowship is to develop a platform fully focused on software testing education. Software testing education offers lots of challenges for both teachers and students.  In this platform, students will exercise different testing skills, such as writing automated test cases that achieve a certain level of coverage, chasing bugs in real-world programs, and developing code in a test-driven manner. Teachers will also leverage the analytics data to understand how their students are doing. The platform will also keep proposing new exercises based on real-world open source bugs.

The aim of my fellowship is to improve our understanding of (the conditions for) effective approaches to strengthening community engagement. I want to develop educational activities that enable students to make a positive local impact through their research and design. Think in terms of developing a knowledge-based intervention or network in a locality (e.g. street, square, neighbourhood, shopping centre, or school area). Or informing urban policy and answering specific knowledge questions that grapple local practitioners who often lack time and other resources to do proper research. I want to achieve this by enabling students to conduct research and design which truly connects to and engages (members of) local communities. This will be done in the context of several bachelor and master courses, which will be further developed for this purpose.

Click here to have a look at the videos Reinout created as part of his fellowship. 

I will use my fellowship to further gamify and blend education. Currently only material-related practices, such as welding, bending and milling are part of the course. To provide the experience of actual shipbuilding practice, I would like to develop a virtual practice, using Virtual Reality (VR) together with the VR-Zone and virtual excursions together with the New Media Centre. In the second phase these models will also be used to create a sort of interactive 3D lecture notes for the course. The main aim is to improve the knowledge retained by and the motivation to study of the students by replacing the statement of facts by experiencing the facts yourselves.

Although you can survive in the Netherlands perfectly well with English, some engineers notice that a good command of Dutch can also be very useful. If you want to be able to function within a Dutch-speaking technical-scientific context, then knowledge of general Dutch is not enough. For this reason, future bachelor students at TU Delft have been taking the course in Language of Science at ITAV for many years. But there are more people looking for a language course at this level. For example, when they start working in the Netherlands in companies where Dutch is the primary language used by colleagues and clients, or when they want to work as a much-needed teacher of mathematics or physics. My Education Fellowship will make it possible to renew the existing Language of Science course and make it available to a wider audience. We can refresh and revise the course material and redesign the existing course into an effective interactive online teaching format. 

At Delft University of Technology we have been ‘making engineers’ for over 175 years. Our engineers are known throughout the world for their resourcefulness and their can-do mentality. Training our engineers has always involved hands on activities. All engineers from Delft have gotten their hands dirty somewhere in their education. During the two year run as an Educational Fellow I will first identify what the common thread in all these practical assignments is, to distill "the Delft Approach to Maker Education (DAME)". I will disentangle what is the common core of making engineers from the discipline specific content. Using this, I will communicate this result with other teachers, both at Delft University of Technology and beyond, to help them with implementing the Delft Approach to Maker Education in their own courses.

My concept for the fellowship is to develop an open and immersive digital textbook that makes use of the latest technology for embedding video and interactivity within the epub format for a digital textbook. This includes embedded teaching videos, virtual experiments with VR capabilities (filming with 360 camera to allow student to control what they see), and interactive problems. The main aim of this project is to increase the engagement for learners outside of the classroom by providing a learning resource that encourages the student to explore and interact with central concepts within a course.

What does education look like when our world will be 'painted with data'?During his two year fellowship, Martijn will make a number of Augmented Reality exhibitions. The exhibitions will showcase spatial education examples from all faculties. Martijn will invite colleagues to collaboratively prototype their future classes, laboratories and studios.

“Structured Electronic design for Engineers”.

To support students in their academic writing tasks, Angeniet will develop online materials about scientific writing that will be accessible for the whole TU community. Past of this will be an information hub about bachelor and master thesis writing, where students from all faculties will be able to find the information they need about this large individual writing task. Furthermore, a new program for giving (peer) feedback, D-PAC, will be tested with students and lecturers. Finally, a writing centre will be started where students can talk with a writing coach.