In early October, the German University of Cairo (GUC) in partnership with the University of Duisburg-Essen hosted a two-day Teach the Teacher workshop for teaching assistants at the university in Cairo. Slim Abdennadher, Vice President of Academic Affairs at the GUC said that the objective of the workshop was to, “support young GUC teaching assistants who are at the beginning of their teaching careers in order to help give them guidance on how to become better teachers.” He added that “the workshop was organized to bring together experts in the field of teaching and education who covered various topics from theory to practice”.

More than sixty teaching assistants participated in various sessions held over the two-day workshop. Maria Rauschenberger and Marc Beardsley from the Department of Technologies at UPF were invited to give workshops and share their expertise in Dyslexia and the Science of Learning.

Maria Rauschenberger, a Ph.D. Student in the Web Science and Social Computing Group (WSSC), is doing interdisciplinary research for the detection and intervention of dyslexia with computer science methods at UPF. Her research was awarded the German Reading Award 2017 for her approach on “Playful and Early Screening with Dyslexia while playing a Game”. She has designed various Games (e.g. Dgames or Dyseggxia) with different researchers from around the world and is a research volunteer for www.changedyslexia.org . Maria engaged future teachers in an interdisciplinary session on ‘Misconceptions, Neuromyths and Dyslexia” to reduce misconceptions about dyslexia and provide advice on increasing the readability and comprehension of teaching materials for all students. Her slides are available at SlideShare.

Marc Beardsley, a Ph.D. Student in the TIDE research group on interactive and distributed technologies for education, is researcher and project manager for two European projects that bridge neuroscience and education – Project Illuminated and Spotlighters. Marc delivered a “Science of Learning Primer for Educators” workshop to attendees – a workshop he has developed through the Erasmus+ Project Illuminated.

The Teach the Teacher workshop was organized under a German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) project called Computing for Intercultural Competence (ComIC) which is jointly run by the Faculty of Media and Engineering Technology (MET) of the German University in Cairo and the Human-Computer Interaction group of the University of Duisburg-Essen. Stefan Schneegass, assistant professor at the University of Duisburg-Essen and co-coordinator of the workshop, was pleased with the outcome of the workshop and contribution of the UPF researchers stating that “Feedback from the teachers has been very positive. Providing new teaching assistants with tools and knowledge on how to increase they teaching efficiency is an important task and one of the challenges we want to tackle in the ComIC project.”