An expert jury of the Special Interest Group Education Technology of the German Society for Computer Science (GI e.V.) awarded the Master thesis of our student Sebastian Serth the best thesis in education technology 2019.

Sebastian’s thesis “Individual Worksheets with Interactive Programming Exercises within the HPI Schul-Cloud” enables school teachers to better embed and adapt existing MOOC content into their classes. In his research at the Enterprise Platform and Integration Concepts group, he implemented a flexible worksheet-editor, allowing to seamlessly embed videos, quizzes, as well as interactive programming exercises. In order to grant teachers deeper insights into learning processes and support individual feedback, additional analytical capabilities were introduced. For these improvements, Sebastian contributed to the open-source worksheet editor edtr.io as well as the open-source code execution platform CodeOcean. His evaluation shows that the concept was well-received by students and teachers alike: Teachers noticed the possibility of a shift in their role from a lecturing instructor to an individual tutor, as students are enabled to learn at their own pace and receive specific, direct feedback based on automated unit tests. Interactive worksheets, as an integrated part of digital education, thus foster informed teacher interventions as part of an individualized student learning process.

The prize will be officially awarded in the context of the next DELFI conference in Heidelberg in September 2020.

Sebastian’s research was supervised by Ralf Teusner and Matthias Uflacker.