Teaching mathematics in Ashesi
ETH mathematician Georg Anegg spent three weeks at Ashesi University in Ghana, which offers a joint master's program in Mechatronics Engineering with ETH Zurich. In an interview published by the D-MATH News, he talks about what it's like to teach in Ashesi and what motivated him to participate in the project.
In fall 2020, ETH Zurich launched a joint master's program with Ashesi University, which is located near Accra, the capital of Ghana. At the beginning of this year, the mechatronics degree program began classes. Over twenty students from seven African countries are taking part. The goal is to use ETH know-how to train engineers in Africa who can drive industrial development in Africa. Swiss industrial companies are among the partners. Lecturers from ETH Zurich are involved in the teaching. Accordingly, the first of them have now gained experience.
One of them, Georg Anegg currently reports in an interview with D-MATH-News about his experiences in teaching mathematics in the mechatronics program. Anegg is a doctoral student at the Institute for Operations research and spent three weeks as a teaching assistant at Ashesi University. Even before his doctorate at ETH, he worked as a tutor and teaching assistant in South Africa for two years. He appreciates the collaboration with dedicated students and people from many different countries: "I have always found it to be an immensely rewarding experience for me personally and academically."
He found the learning environment at Ashesi to be wonderfully stimulating. The students were thoughtful and extremely motivated, he says. "They put a lot of time into all the material and were not satisfied until all their questions were answered."
How he dealt with the fact that the students had very different mathematical knowledge, and that their experiences and expectations also differed considerably from those of ETH students, he describes in the interview with our colleague Monika Krichel of D-MATH.
