The Aerospace Engineering students voted Hans the "Best lecturer of the year 2003"
The students of the School of Engineering Sciences voted Hans to be one of
the funniest lecturers (together with Dr. A. R. Chambers and Dr
N. Stephen) in 2003. The prize is a Bart Simpson poster (which is now
attached to his office door).
Hans was voted second best Lecturer by the Aerospace Engineering students in 2004 (and got a box of very nice chocolates for this).
Hans was voted to be the Lecturer with the best sense of humour by all the students in the School of Engineering Science in 2004. (And got two Homer Simpson posters for this (no pictures available as yet) [In fact, there was also a small box of chocolates].) No further student votes have been taken in the following years.
Hans was the delegate of the University of Southampton for the Young Education Programme 2005 and the winner in the group category (with A Cobson, H Carter and D Meikle). He is now a senior fellow of the Young UK and Ireland Programme.
In 2006, Hans was awarded the Deputy Vice Chancellor's Teaching Award for Innovation (£1000) in his educational activities: He re-developed the computing curriculum in the School of Engineering
Sciences from 2002 onwards and introduced new learning and teaching methods in
large-class modules. He has modified the structure of the lectures,
and introduced laboratory sessions in which students tackle tasks in a
self-paced manner to improve their problem-solving skills. He
introduced a help session in which interested students can seek
practical advice either to catch up or to extend their skills beyond
the course expectations. The new course structure and the modified
content was warmly welcomed by the student body.
In 2010, Hans was awarded the Deputy Vice Chancellor's Teaching Award for Innovation (£ 1000) in his educational activities (jointly with Prof Martyn Hill and Sarah Rogers) for the development and implementation of the Elevator Pitch Funding of Group Design Projects: "The Elevator Pitch has paved the way for the development of other
enterprise activities and the Award recognises the value placed on this by the School."
In 2013, Hans received the Vice
Chancellor's Teaching Award (£ 1000) for Outstanding contributions to
Education at the University of Southampton. For his teaching of
programming and computational methods in Science and
Engineering, he iniated and
implemented a problem-solvid based learning approach where
students work on weekly laboratory exercise and can submit
solution code by email to a testing system. Within a minute, the
student receives a reply email which confirms that the code
works correctly, or highlights which functionality is missing or
computes incorrect results. The immediate feedback, which can be
obtained repeatedly by submitting an improved version of code
with the next email, has made a vast improvement in the
efficiency of the learning of computing.
In 2019, Hans was
teaching an introduction to Computational Science and Data Science in the physics department at the
University of Hamburg. Based on the evaluation of the 40 participating
students, he was awarded the second prize for teaching. Teaching method included weekly self-paced problem solving exercises,
live coding, automatic feedback provision. The module was assessed through computational exercises that required writing code using a computer.
Hans is investigating novel learning methods in teaching
undergraduate and postgraduate students computational science. This
includes changes in the learning activities, learning environment and
use of modern software engineering approaches and languages.
Selected references:
H. Fangohr. A Comparison of C, Matlab and Python as Teaching Languages in Engineering. Lecture Notes on Computational Science 3039, 1210-1217 (2004) (available online)
H. Fangohr. Exploiting Real-Time 3d Visualisation to Enthuse Students: A Case Study of Using Visual Python in Engineering. Lecture Notes on Computational Science 3992, 136-146 (2006) (available online)
Hans Fangohr, Neil O'Brien, Anil Prabhakar, Arti Kashyap Teaching Python programming with automatic assessment and feedback provision
(Online: arXiv.org)
Through a project by Alvaro Perez and Hans Fangohr, a mod for
Minecraft has been created that allows execution of Python scripts
inside Minecraft, by carrying a Python script as a tool (in the same
that Minecraft players carry swords, axes or torches) and being able
to executed on demand by pressing a button.
In the picture, Hans can be seen teaching secondary school pupils some
fundamentals of physics ('the pendulum' can be seen in the picture) and computer
simulations of such processes.
After measuring the length of the pendulum, the motion of the real pendulum was
compared with the (nearly) identical motion of the simulated and visualised
pendulum.
