Practical work and lab classes
before, during and after the pandemic
During the lockdown and remote teaching time, it was especially challenging to implement practical work and lab work profitably in teaching. Quick creative solutions had to be found. In some cases, these have been convincing even after the pandemic and have led to a permanent rethinking or new content and goals that continue to be valid.
In this Refresh Teaching Event, three lectures which were nominated for the KITE Award will shed light on how they implemented project work during the pandemic and, above all, how this experience changed their teaching in the long term.
Dr. Andreas Eggenberger (D-PHYS)
Dr. Andreas Eggenberger is responsible for the physics labs at ETH Zurich. When the pandemic forced all lab activities to be suspended, he, together with a team of highly motivated teaching assistants, managed to transfer traditional lab courses into online lab courses by inventing new experiments that did not rely on dedicated equipment, but could be performed at home by the students with tools and equipment present in every household. The online experiments had such high didactical and educational value that some experiments will be kept permanently in the portfolio of the physics lab. This achievement was acknowledged by the Lecturer’s Conference by awarding Andreas Eggenberger and his team with the Kite Award 2022.
Prof. Dr. Simone Schürle (D-HEST)
Simone Schürle-Finke (D-HEST) is a German biomedical engineer and assistant professor and Principal Investigator for the Responsive Biomedical Systems Laboratory within the Department of Health Sciences and Technology at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) Zürich in Switzerland. Schürle is a pioneer in nanorobotic and magnetic servoing technologies. Her research program is aimed at understanding cellular mechanisms of disease and then subsequently innovating minimally invasive nano- and micro-scale therapeutic and diagnostic technologies for these diseases.
Jeremy Coulson (D-ITET) and Paul Beuchat (University of Melbourne)
Jeremy Coulson is a PhD student with the Automatic Control Lab at ETH Zürich under the supervision of Prof. Florian Dörfler and Prof. John Lygeros.
He is interested in data-driven control and machine learning with applications in robotics. His goal is to directly use data to make predictions and design reliable control algorithms for complex systems.
Paul Beuchat is currently a teaching fellow at the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering. He completed his doctoral degree at ETH Zurich, Switzerland, in 2019 under the supervision of Prof. John Lygeros at the Automatic Control Laboratory.
