The Athena Prizes recognize the special importance of academic teaching at TU Darmstadt. Each department awards an Athena Department Prize, from which the main Athena Prize is then selected. Special prizes are also awarded for Digital Teaching, Gender- and Diversity-Sensitive Teaching and Interdisciplinary Teaching.

This year, the course “Shaping the Energy Transition”, which was jointly designed by etit professors Florian Steinke and Stefan Niessen, their colleagues Jonas Hülsmann and Pascal Friedrich as well as Professor Michèle Knoth and Lucas Flatz from the Department of Social and Historical Sciences, was awarded the Athena Prize for Interdisciplinary Teaching.

The special prize for interdisciplinary teaching is endowed with 5,000 euros. It was awarded to the interdisciplinary team from the Department of Electrical Engineering and Information Technology and the Department of Social and Historical Sciences for innovative and interdisciplinary team teaching on energy transformation with a specially programmed serious game/energy transition game.

The course “Shaping the energy transition” offers students of political science and engineering a broadening of horizons for the socially highly relevant and complex topic of the energy transition and also fulfills the criteria of good interdisciplinary teaching. An innovative approach combines a lecture part, a seminar part and a practical part. In the practical part, students apply the knowledge they have acquired in a specially programmed serious game and learn about the mechanisms of the energy transition in a fun way.

Here you can find the link to the article that describes the course in more detail.

In close cooperation with the Institute for Diagnostic and Interventional Radiology (DIR) at Goethe University Frankfurt (headed by Professor Thomas Vogl), the Department of Measurement and Sensor Technology (MUST) has developed a practical course in which both the specialist vocabulary and the basics of robotics are taught. Helene", a robotic arm developed together with students, will be used.

The experiment focuses on liver biopsy: the doctor takes a tissue sample from a tumor (biopsy) during the puncture. This scenario is perfect for a teaching experiment due to the large differences in density of the tissue layers under consideration.

Here you can find the link to the article that describes the course in more detail.