Mailed on 23 April 2021.

 

Educational Newsletter

A collaboration between the study programme and W.S.G. Abacus

Edition: April 2021

Spring has arrived. Unfortunately, Corona is still affecting our lives. I am, however, hopeful that with the national vaccination programme, we are moving, slowly but steadily, towards our way out of the Corona-situation.  No, I do not think it will be completely over (soon), but with responsible behaviour from our side, we will be able to get more social/together-time, that we are currently missing so much.
In this newsletter, you can read short summary-reports from Module-02 and Module-06.  In the last couple of months, many new colleagues have joined our department.  This newsletter introduces a few of them.  The others will be introduced to you in the next edition.  It is unfortunate that we have to start the newsletter again with an obituary.  I hope that we do not need to repeat this anymore.
Wishing you all a safe and healthy time,
Pranab Mandal, Programme Director AM

Besides the regular module evaluations and the introduction of new lecturers, you can also read about the Applied Mathematics Education Prize (AMEP) that was handed out in the Education week and about the National Mathematics Symposium (NWS) which Abacus has the honor of organizing this year. Enjoy reading!
Anouk Beursgens, Officer Educational Affairs W.S.G. Abacus

 

Obituary

With extremely heavy heart, we pause for a moment to pay respect to Brigit Geveling who has passed away on the night of  2 to 3 March, 2021.  She was the department's undergraduate coordinator for a long time, and in that role, she was the anchor for many generations of math students. Until the end of her career, she actively searched for the most effective education forms for the changing student. She had to give this up because of her physical condition. We will miss her very much.

AMEP

This year Gjerrit Meinsma, Nelly Litvak and Tracy Craig were nominated for the AMEP. All three of them gave a wonderful talk about the theme ‘Virtual Mathematics’. Eventually, Tracy Craig was crowned winner of this year’s AMEP by the students, but all three nominees ended up very close and really showed, even in that instance, just how wonderful teachers they are. The education committee thanks them all three for participating and congratulates Tracy with her well deserved win.
The best three teachers of the decentral education prizes compete for the UTEA (University of Twente Education Award) on the 27th of May at 16:00 in Teams.

National Mathematics Symposium

Annually, the National Mathematics Symposium (NWS) takes place and this year, W.S.G. Abacus has the honour of organising it. This symposium will take place on June 4th 2021, and has the theme “Find your limit’’. During this day, several interesting lectures and workshops related to the theme will be held. For more information, see the website.

 

Module Evaluations

Module 2

Module 2 is commonly perceived as the most challenging module in the program. This year Covid-19 made the module even more challenging. Our lecturers have put considerable effort into developing digital course materials as well as online educational activities to encourage interaction.  However, a larger problem was the limited face-to-face interaction, not only between teachers and students, but also between students themselves. Halfway into the module, things got worse when all on-Campus education was cancelled.

We saw that students were trying as best as they can to cope up with the situation. Next year, we really hope that things are back to normal. Nevertheless, we are going to use feedback received (on the digital materials and activities) to improve them during the next iteration. In particular, and especially, if the COVID-19 situation persists, to mitigate the negative effects of the lack of on-Campus education, we shall try to design activities that will keep the students motivated to form groups and work together. 

One of the feedbacks from last year was that the exams are too crammed up towards the end of the quarter.  This year, we have spread out the regular exams (first attempts) more, for example by bringing forward the Analysis exam in the 7\textsuperscript{th} week.  However, we could not change much on the resit-schedule due to the hard restriction that they have to be scheduled within the quarter.  

The perception of the high workload in this module seems to be a recurring issue.  We are going to make a deeper analysis on this issue by looking at the materials and the learning goals on one hand, and on the other, corroborating them with the time required/available to successfully achieve them. We hope this analysis will lead to some adjustments to reduce the total workload of the module.

Finally, next year the project will start earlier. We have noticed that the contact moments (the number of contacts and the way to do that) between the students and the supervisors are not ideal, due to the fact that it starts just before the Christmas holiday.  By starting the project earlier this issue will be resolved.

Module 6

The structure and design of this module was changed this year, due to the start of TOM 2.0. In particular, Numerical Mathematics was made a more stand-alone course, though still very much connected to the other subjects ODE and ST.  

We took this opportunity to accommodate suggestions from previous evaluations and updated the material and organization of Numerical Mathematics. In particular, a theoretical part was added for students to better appreciate the different applied themes and to help prepare for the practical parts. The module team recognizes that as a consequence, the total workload may have increased a bit. The team will look into it and take necessary actions. For example, the organization of the exams of Numerical Methods will be changed next year.

Overall, the module went well. There were some initial hiccups due to the changes mentioned above as well as the fact that the educational activities were mostly online.  For example, the ODE teacher had to go through several electronic platforms before finding the most suitable one.  Also, some initial issues with the deadlines were fixed relatively quickly.  For example, the organization of the exams of Numerical Methods will be changed next year. Instead of 2 exams, there will only be 1 exam

The module team is happy that even in the online setting, the challenge of the week is appreciated by the students and has contributed to their learning.  In their feedback, some students mention about unclarity and workload related to the project.  Next year, some adaptations will be made to the introductory problem of the project to reduce the workload. On the other hand, special attention will be paid to communicate the goals of the project so that expectations of the students are more aligned. In particular, that the “final” project is by design and intentionally kept open, stimulating discussions among the team members, and challenging all to formulate precisely and iteratively in the team what the main interest is, why this is so interesting, what could be steps toward an analysis of the problem, what mathematical methods could be useful and how to present the findings.

 

New lecturers

Ashoke Kumar Sinha

Ashoke Kumar Sinha has joined the University of Twente as a lecturer in the Department of Applied Mathematics in January 2021. He received his Bachelor of Statistics and Master of Statistics degrees from the Indian Statistical Institute. He did his PhD in Statistics from the Erasmus University Rotterdam. His research interests are in extreme value theory and its applications, estimating probability of rare events and empirical processes. Ashoke worked as a faculty at the Tilburg University (Netherlands) and later at the Bilkent University (Turkey). He also taught part time at the Actuarieel Instituut (Netherlands). Before joining UT, he was working at the Michigan State University (USA). His research work are published in well-known Statistics, Probability and Econometrics journals. Lately he concentrated more in teaching. His endeavour in teaching was awarded with “Best Teacher Award” at the Tilburg University and the “College of Natural Science (CNS) Teaching Award” at the Michigan State University. Outside academics, Ashoke likes to read, watch football, films and detective series and listen to music.

Mengwu Guo

Dr. Mengwu Guo is an Assistant Professor in Applied Mathematics at the University of Twente since February 2021. Before joining the university, Mengwu was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Oden Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences at The University of Texas at Austin. Prior to that, he was a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Institute of Mathematics at Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL). Before his postdoctoral appointments, Mengwu received his B.Eng. and PhD degrees in Civil Engineering in 2013 and 2017, respectively, both from Tsinghua University (Beijing, China) with top honors. Mengwu’s research interests span several areas of computational sciences and engineering, including model order reduction, data-driven modeling, uncertainty quantification, and scientific machine learning. With an interdisciplinary background between engineering sciences and computational mathematics, Mengwu has been dedicated to the development of high-performance numerical methods towards real-world engineering applications.