VR4Teach receives special prize for digital teaching

IIB honored at the 2019 Athene awards

2019/12/13

In recognition of academic teaching at the TU Darmstadt, the Carlo and Karin Giersch Foundation awarded this year’s Athene awards on 27th November. Amongst other things, the prize for digital teaching, endowed with 5,000 euros, was also awarded. Here, the IIB was honored for addressing current issues and challenges in the field of study and teaching.

Presentation of the VR4Teach project at the 2019 Athene awards ceremony

The special Digital Teaching prize of 5,000 euros was awarded to the Institute of Numerical Methods and Computer Science in Civil Engineering (iib) and the Institute of Construction and Building Materials (WiB) with the respective members Professor Uwe Rüppel, Professor Eddie Koenders, Christian Eller, M.Sc., Michael Disser, B.Sc., Pascal Mosler, B.Sc., Shifan Zhang, M.Sc. and Christoph Mankel, M.Sc. (all from the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering) for the “VR4Teach” project as a virtual reality platform for collaborative visualization of complex teaching content using their own smartphones, tablets or laptops.

The project was developed interdisciplinary and validated in a lecture of the WIB. Student assistants were able to use the VR laboratory in the IIB to develop VR4Teach and gain first insights into the new technology of virtual reality in the context of engineering sciences. The project ran over one semester and the process of software development could be learned and tested beginning with an idea, requirement analysis and finally the prototype implementation and subsequent testing. The positive feedback of the testing students shows that the idea of VR4Teach is future-oriented. Therefore, we would like to thank the Carlo and Karin Giersch Foundation for receiving the award and are looking forward to the acknowledgement of our work and future projects.

For more information and impressions of the evening please refer to the news article by the university (german language only).

VR4Teach at the 2019 Athene awards ceremony

Presentation of the VR4Teach project at the 2019 Athene awards ceremony

The winners from WIB and IIB

A special thank you to the student assistants Pascal Mosler (m.) and Michael Disser (r.)