Teaching Certificate

The Teaching Certificate is offered by the ExAcT-Team at RWTH Aachen, it is a wonderful free resource for all scientific staff at RWTH to improve and expand their take on university education.

Teaching certificate

The fIT team at RWTH Aachen University has been offering free IT training for students since the summer semester of 2008. The team is made up of student assistants who organize themselves independently to a large extent. The courses teach the use of common IT programs (currently Office package, SPSS, LaTeX and MATLAB) as well as presentation techniques.

Each semester I offer four introductory block courses in MATLAB as well as a block course “Simulating with MATLAB and SIMULINK”. The courses have a duration of 16 hours each and take place on a Friday and Saturday. In order to ensure a target-oriented supervision ratio, the number of participants is limited to 35 students per course. Due to the technical orientation of the RWTH, the MATLAB courses are in great demand, so that my offer of a maximum of 160 places in one semester cannot cover the demand for advanced training. After the discontinuation of the “Treffpunkt MATLAB” of the Institute of Control Engineering of the RWTH, the course “Introduction to MATLAB” is currently the only freely accessible course for all students.

No CPs are awarded for the course, but a certificate is issued after successful participation. For this, students submit a homework assignment at the end of the block course that tests the concepts learned in the course. The participants are mixed in terms of subject matter, so that different levels of prior knowledge must be taken into account. The largest group of participants typically consists of engineering students (mechanical and electrical engineering), although students from the field of medicine or other disciplines also participate.

During the event, students can already gain initial experience in using the software. I introduce important program components to the participants, and then the participants try their hand at the exercises. During this practical phase I am available for questions. In addition to the introductory courses, I also supervise the course “Simulating with MATLAB and SIMULINK”. In the summer semester 2019, I have redefined the Learning Outcomes of the course, as I would like to focus more on the possibilities of simulation with MATLAB. The course “Simulating with MATLAB and SIMULINK” is intended to reinforce the fundamentals learned in the course “Introduction to MATLAB” and put the content in context with simulation.

Previously, the focus of the course was on learning the software extension package SIMULINK, but without going into the theoretical background that underlies simulation. However, the backgrounds are quite interesting at this point and can clearly contribute to the understanding of the contents.