Teaching Practices

Research-based learning

I was fascinated by research-based learning when I first encountered it in the Towards Professionalisation of Learning and Teaching course. I particularly liked the idea of students actively participating in research. While I base several problems on my own work in astronomy, and have begun incorporating students in a research program. I would like to start shifting towards including "mini-projects" in my course, allowing students more freedom in applying the concepts taught in the course, especially with a focus on astronomical data analysis, which I obviously have experience in. 

Introduction of a programming competition

I frequently view the PHY322 practical course as a smaller version of the Honours course. Although this course is very short and I did not see much room for a research project, I decided to incorporate research-based learning in the form of an optional programming competition, similar to the one that so inspired me in my undergraduate (see "Teaching Influences" on the Teaching Philosophy  page). By making it optional but incentivising it with small prizes, my hope is that many students of all experience levels will participate. I again tried to make this experience authentic in two ways. Firstly by allowing students to choose a topic that interests them and aligns with their anticipated career choice. Secondly by getting them to submit their competition entry in a publicly-available online form (such as on github.com) which I have told them will form part of their own public portfolio. Both potential physics supervisors and potential employers will often look for public code written by the applicant to check their experience level beyond what is in their CV.

Only six students entered the competition in 2022, although I suspect this small uptake was a result of too high a workload and too short a timeframe. However, two entries were very good. One student wrote a program to automatically send him alerts of stock price changes and the winning entry was a joint project from two students who worked on a data analysis project for some astronomical data. Their code is publicly available here. Although I'd like to see more entries, the competition allowed an opportunity for passionate students to express their creativity, push themselves and hopefully learn more about what potential career they may enjoy. The pictures below show the winning students hard at work on their project (left) and proudly holding their certificates (right).

New third year research projects

In 2024, we began introducing research projects back into the undergraduate curriculum. I ended up taking four 3rd year students to work on a novel research project in collaboration with my colleagues at the European Space Agency. They recently launched ESA Datalabs, an innovative cloud-computing platform that allows users from anywhere in the world to login and write code to analyse huge ESA datasets. We tasked the students with running a machine learning pipeline to look for anomalous galaxies in data from the Hubble Space Telescope and then write about an interesting object they found. The goal was to expose them to cutting-edge approaches to modern astronomical analysis and stretch their astronomy knowledge. I relied heavily on my postdoc, Dr Bertie Seyffert, who took the lead in developing the infrastructure for the project and guiding the students through it.

I plan to continue building up research skills throughout the undergraduate experience to better prepare students for postgraduate research and industry experience simultaneously. Students in developed countries have opportunities for internships as young as high school, something which is lacking in this country. While not all students will have the interest or capacity to explore additional projects, I believe providing them with the opportunity will strengthen the pipeline and retain talented students for postgraduate studies.