Georg has been working at IDEMS on a variety of projects since May 2021. His main focus is maths education and technology, especially around the use of automated assessment using STACK, a system where questions are authored using a computer algebra system and that offers mechanisms for detailed feedback. Other work includes designing data pipelines for building chatbots, used e.g. in the ParentText project, devising and prototyping the mathematical modeling framework psymple, building a chatbot that is regularly used to collect over 30000 submissions to mathematics competitions in Rwanda using photos of answer sheets, and earlier on project management and development for the Internet of Good Things.

With his studies, Georg has always stayed near the intersection of mathematics and computer science, doing an undergraduate in both subjects at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, a master’s in combinatorics and optimization at the University of Waterloo, and a PhD on computational geometry algorithms at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria. During his PhD, Georg did three internships at Google, and designed and taught the course “Introduction to Programming in Python” at in 2017 (and again in 2019), for which he won the Golden Sponge award for the best course of the academic year 2017/2018.

Georg’s experience in education and teaching reaches much further back, though. In his undergraduate he was a tutor for a seminar training students for programming competitions, and he continued to have a few teaching assistantships during his master’s. In 2014 he spent half a year as a tutor at the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences (AIMS) in Ghana, including for courses such as Python programming and graph theory. Since then he has stayed involved in maths education initiatives in Africa. In particular he has been co-facilitating math camps for high school students, organizing workshops, training a team in Kenya on creating STACK questions and in 2023 Georg volunteered as a tutor at AddisCoder, a program for bright high school students in Ethiopia to learn programming from zero to algorithms.

Outside of work, Georg is passionate about rock climbing, learning about wildlife and biodiversity and going on adventures in nature.

What social problem is nearest and dearest to you? 

Improving the quality of education to better convey scientific questioning, critical thinking and problem solving skills (and to some extent problem solving tools, through technical literacy). Democracy requires transparency and a populace willing to engage in a evidence-based and rational discourse, and authoritarians are working on eroding these values.

What’s the most challenging project or problem you’re working on right now?

My colleagues and our team in Kenya have been creating and using STACK questions over the last 6 years, for various institutions and contexts, and of varying quality. Organizing and maintaining this content so that it is easy to find relevant materials and to ensure that local improvements are fed back into our question bank is a big challenge.

This work is important to keep supporting institutions across Africa (and hopefully beyond) and guarantee that the materials used are of good quality to help students in their learning process. The potential for a good question bank is huge: For example, Ethiopia has a centralized undergraduate curriculum, and content used in one institution could be scaled across the entire country. Similarly, there is a current effort to create interactive textbooks for Kenyan high-schools that integrate STACK materials.

Scaling digital content with automatic feedback for students to engage in, followed up by research on the usage of this data to improve these materials and understand learning patterns, would be a high-impact intervention fostering collaboration between local institutions/researchers and international researchers.

Why did/do you choose to work at IDEMS? 

I’ve had experience in academia (through my PhD), industry (through internships), and wanted to try out something else. I was also attracted by the shared vision and hoping to do meaningful and impactful work, especially in education.

What in your education and/or past professional or personal experiences is most relevant to the work you’re currently doing?

Problem solving, analytical and programming skills from my studies and industry internships; a better (but still very limited) understanding of education systems, communication and culture in a few African countries (through my work as a tutor at AIMS and various other initiatives and projects).

Where is home? 

It’s hard for me to call one place home, having lived in so many places. I grew up in a rural/suburban area close to nature, though I commuted to school in the city of Dresden. I’ve been living in Vienna, Austria, for almost a decade now, but I’ve never fully adapted to an urban lifestyle. I spend a good portion of my time elsewhere, for example for work projects or rock climbing, and I try to come back to my parents’ home for a bit every year and figure out how I can give something back, after having received so much support during my younger years.