2011-06-28: Job: PhD Fellowship: Math-Sketching on Interactive Whiteboards
The Joint International PhD Program Informatics JKU/UAS Section Softwarepark Hagenberg offers a limited number of fellowships for excellent students. The fellowships are awarded for three years and comfortably cover living expenses and health insurance in Austria, Europe.
The PhD student would be part of the Media Interaction Lab and work under the supervision of Dr. Michael Haller and Dr. Markus Hohenwarter. Please check our website for an overview of our research profile (http://www.mi-lab.org).
- Duration of the Contract: 3 years
- Starting Date: Fall 2011
- Application Deadline: July 15, 2011
Research Goals
Interactive Whiteboards are becoming increasingly important. They provide a powerful solution for discussion meetings, but can also be highly useful for educational applications. Mathematical problems, for example, could be analyzed in a more intuitive way. Especially for teachers it is often difficult to explain abstract and difficult mathematical ideas without visual help. A prompt visualization can be very helpful to support explanations on a complex subject. These types of visualization can be provided by a digital whiteboard as an additional benefit. Furthermore, this interactive learning tool allows students to “play” with formulas and provide a more enjoyable way to explore mathematical problems. The proposed project should be based on the open source mathematical software package GeoGebra, which was designed to combine features of interactive geometry software (e.g. Cabri Geometry, Geometer's Sketchpad) and computer algebra systems (e.g. Derive, Maple) in a single, integrated, and easy-to-use system for teaching and learning mathematics. The current version of GeoGebra offers dynamically linked multiple representations for mathematical objects through its graphical, algebraic, and spreadsheet views. The proposed PhD thesis project will focus on designing an interactive formula editor based on GeoGebra to be used on digital whiteboards.
The challenge in this PhD thesis is the combination of both systems with the overall goal to develop an intuitive and easy‐to‐sketch math tool. The developed framework should also be formally evaluated based on a longitudinal evaluation.
Profile/Personal Qualification of the Candidate
The International PhD program in Informatics Hagenberg invites outstanding students to apply for admission to its degree program. Admission requirements are a Bachelor and Master's degree in informatics or a related field from an accredited university with a minimum of 300 ECTS points (or an equivalent amount of course work).
More information about how to submit the application can be found at: http://www.faw.jku.at/phd/
If you need further details, please contact
- Dr. Michael Haller, haller@fh-hagenberg.at
- Dr. Markus Hohenwarter, markus.hohenwarter@jku.at
by Michael Haller via CHI-JOBS mailing list