Trio recognised for innovative teaching

Åke Fäldt, Professor at the Department of Physics and Astronomy, has been awarded the Pedagogical Prize for introducing what are known as group quizzes in his courses. This has enabled the students to work together to solve problems and earn some credits towards their examinations.

The inspiration came from a study visit to Vancouver. There, the students first took an examination individually and then retook it as a group.

- I thought that it might be possible to do something similar on a smaller scale, and that is how the group quizzes came about.

After completing a number of assignments, the students qualify for the group quizzes. Åke Fäldt then divides them into groups of five. But the first attempt ran into difficulties.

- We noticed that the students divided the questions among themselves and completed one each. It was not group work in the true sense of the term.

Shared surface gives better collaboration

He therefore changed the format. Instead, the groups were asked to solve the problems on a whiteboard, photograph their solution and submit the photograph.

- We conducted an experiment in which twelve groups submitted their work on paper and twelve groups submitted photographs of their whiteboards. The groups that submitted photographs performed twice as well as those that submitted their work on paper.

The explanation lies in the collaboration that arises naturally around a shared surface.

- When work is submitted on paper, there is no real critical review. But when they have to write up a solution together on the board, the discussion instead becomes: 'Are you sure you can do it this way?' I think that is rather good, because they have to take responsibility for their solutions and assess whether they are correct or not, says Åke Fäldt.

Group dynamics

In group exercises, it is important to avoid situations where some people do more than others, or where some participants do not make their voices heard. This is one reason why Åke Fäldt does not allow the students to choose their own group members.

- I do not think people dare to cheat in groups where they do not know each other very well. It becomes a bigger step. It may also mean that someone who does not have any friends to study with gains a study group in the process.

Åke Fäldt has also recorded the exercises on video.

- We have seen that someone will occasionally say something very insightful at the beginning, when the group is trying to solve a problem. But because that person may not have particularly high status within the group, the others disregard what he or she says. You can then see the group arrive at the same solution a little later. It is quite interesting.

He hopes that more people at Chalmers will begin using the method in their teaching.

- It does not involve a great deal of work and should be suitable for all subjects.

Shivesh Kumar, Assistant Professor in Dynamics at Mechanical Engineering, is awarded for having developed and integrated the online learning platform CloudPendulum for robotics and physical AI education. It gives students the chance to conduct real-time, real-world experiments from distance.

Shivesh Kumar describes CloudPendulum as "an initiative to democratise hardware access for robotics education and research". He got the idea when the pandemic restricted the student's access to labs.

- With all the recent advancements in cloud and Internet of Things technologies, I thought: how difficult is it to have a lab which allows just-in-time experimentation for robotics?

Therefore, Shivesh Kumar built an ecosystem where students could log into robots from anywhere in the world.

- All you need is an internet-enabled device with a browser and you can write code, do experiments, see what is happening on the robot on a live stream, and get all the sensor data and a video recording of what happened in your experiment instantly.

Available all day all over the world

The students do their programming and testing in simulation before running their code on the robot. The experiments themselves are mostly around 10 - 20 seconds long, which prevents queuing even if many are logged in at the same time. This also makes the tool available for a lot of people and experiments.

- It scales very well. Even if you are teaching a classroom of 50 students, you don't need 50 robots because we separate development time and actual experiment time. It's live 24/7, so people in other parts of the world can use it when we are not using it. It's leading to a maximum utilisation of resources, says Shivesh Kumar.

The eight robots in total, four each of two different types, have had over 100 active users and 75 000 experiments made in the year that the platform has been live.

- On the pedagogical front, what it has really done is increase student engagement in exercises, tutorials and classrooms. Students spend much more time understanding and learning an algorithm because now they have a physical system on which they can test, says Shivesh Kumar.

- Some of the students said that they spend four to six hours more on solving a task than they would have if they were only working in simulation.

Makes lab time more focused

Shivesh Kumar also thinks the platform makes his teaching easier.

- Organising a physical lab is always a bit of a mess. Robots are expensive to buy and hard to maintain. Sometimes you spend half of the lab time just with complex installation steps and solving bugs on students' computers. Now everyone gets a homogeneous environment to start with, and I can focus on communicating what I want to teach.

Gregory Gay, Associate Professor in Interaction Design and Software Engineering, is awarded Chalmers' Pedagogical prize for having "created clear pathways for students to engage with both research and industry throughout their education through the development of new master's programmes and innovative courses."

Computer science and software engineering are fields that change rapidly. To a big extent because of AI, but also because of other new technologies and new ways of developing software.

"I think that means that education also has to evolve really quickly as well, to make sure that students are prepared to go into this field and develop these pieces of software that are more complex and capable than before," says Gregory Gay.

Therefore, he saw the need of education to be more in touch with time.

"Education needs to be connected closely to the field itself, in different ways. One of those is in conjunction with industry and making sure that the content we're teaching is relevant and modern."

The programme changes with the field

When the field itself is evolving, it also has effects on how the programme is built.

"For example, in the new programme, one of our big topics that we're highlighting what we call AI engineering, which is how you do software engineering of systems that have AI in them, systems that are semi-autonomous and changing on their own", says Gregory Gay.

He says this is something that actively changes every day.

"Which means that the programs also need to be closely connected to research as well. I saw gaps in that and have tried to create opportunities for students to be constantly close to researchers throughout the program, and not just when they do their thesis at the end."

The reorganisation of Chalmers masters' programmes came with good timing.

"It was a good opportunity to take a moment and look at what we have done with our programme. We tried to make sure that the course contents across the program and the courses that we offer are relevant and modern and reflect what is happening in practice."

Because of that there is now an individual project course where students can do a research project and get credit for doing that and working embedded in a research lab at the university. There is also an initiative where students can work part-time as a paid research assistant in the department.

"So now students can very flexibly + if they are interested in PhD studies or a research and development job in industry + they can build a research portfolio throughout their master's programme," says Gregory Gay.

In addition, there is also an industrial project course where students get credit for doing an internship at a company.

"This gives them some job experience, and opportunities that can build into the thesis over time. It better prepares them to go into their careers."

Hard work behind a new programme

Gregory Gay has put a lot of effort in promoting the new courses to colleagues, researchers, and external actors.

"You can't just create a course and expect it to work. There has been a fair amount of raising awareness, trying to find contacts and to build on the ones we already have - and to show both companies and researchers that these students exist and could become their future colleagues."

Gregory Gay is happy over receiving the Pedagogical prize.

"Like most people involved in education, I am not doing this to get awards. But it is nice to see your work getting recognised."