The University of Twente's FlexSciLabs project has won third prize at the presentation of the Dutch Education Grant for scientific education. Sissi de Beer received the prize from education minister Robbert Dijkgraaf at the festive award ceremony during the Comenius Festival in Nieuwegein. The third prize comes with a financial contribution of 500 thousand euros. The project Placemaking: relay for city makers from the University of Amsterdam won the main prize, ahead of Investing in student welfare pays off! from Radboud University.
Dutch Education Grant
The Dutch Education Grant is the highest award in secondary vocational education and higher education. The prize is awarded to education teams in appreciation of, and as an impetus for, educational innovation and improvement in senior secondary vocational, higher vocational and university education. The prize is awarded annually to education teams that have developed an educational initiative in the past four years. This year, for the first time, the prize will also be awarded to educational teams in mbo. Last year, the Dutch Education Grant for higher education was won by UT's Master-insert Shaping Responsible Futures.
FlexSciLabs
FlexSciLabs work on making practical education more flexible within the Applied Physics (TN), Chemical Science and Engineering (CSE) and Advanced Technology (AT) programmes of the TNW faculty. Flexibilisation is reflected in students doing their practicals and projects at any time and place they want. This creates less stress as students can organise their education themselves. It also makes education more accessible to people who otherwise have difficulty attending fixed times, such as top athletes or people with disabilities. In addition, it promotes students' independence and gives them ownership of the learning process, which in turn enhances learning. Examples of FlexSciLabs include TN's Module 4 project in which M&M sorting machines are built, and the final project of the Polymer Physics subject within CSE that recently led to a publication.
Essential to the success of FlexSciLabs is the broad background of the people working on it. The team includes teachers, students, technicians, educationalists, managers and even high school teachers. By combining the expertise of all these people, but also by taking student feedback seriously, FlexSciLabs has continued to improve and has now led to the National Education Prize. The UT team behind FlexSciLabs consists of Sissi de Beer, Leonie Chapel, Noah van Dijk, Stefan Kooij, Aernout van Rossum, Arnoud Onnink, Paul Rupert, Imre van Veldhoven, Jeroen Verschuur and Herbert Wormeester.
With the prize money, the UT team wants to take a professionalisation step and investigate more precisely why FlexSciLabs works so well. In addition, the ambition is to translate FlexSciLabs into projects for secondary and primary schools and projects in countries where less money is available for education.
Comenius Fellowships
Recently, the Comenius fellowships were also announced by NRO, the National Education Research Organisation. Janneke Ettema (ITC faculty) was awarded a Senior Fellow grant, Mark Vlutters (ET faculty) will receive a Teaching Fellows grant.
