Award Ceremony 2024

Biography Salome Flegr

Salome Flegr was born in Tübingen. After completing her Bachelor of Science in Physics at the University of Ulm in 2015, she spent an Erasmus semester abroad at the University of Surrey in the UK. She obtained her Master of Education: Secondary School Teaching Physics and Mathematics at the University of Stuttgart in 2019. She then worked at the Leibniz-Institut für Wissensmedien Tübingen (IWM) as a research assistant and doctoral student. In January 2023, she finally completed her doctorate in physics didactics at the TU Kaiserslautern (TUK) / RPTU in Kaiserslautern. She received her dissertation entitled "Combining rather than comparing apples and oranges: Real and virtual experiments in science education" with distinction ("summa cum laude").

From 2022, Salome Flegr worked as a research assistant and postdoctoral researcher at the Chair of Physics Education at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München before being appointed Junior Professor (W1) of Physics Education (with tenure track to W2) at Technische Universität Dresden in fall 2024.

Multiple awards

Salome Flegr has already received several awards for her specialist knowledge and research work. In 2012, she received the school prize from the German Physical Society for outstanding achievements in physics at the Theodor-Heuss-Gymnasium Aalen. She completed her Bachelor's degree with an ECTS grade of A, which puts her in the top ten percent of the last four semesters of the course. She was awarded a Deutschlandstipendium scholarship at the University of Ulm and received a FundaMINT scholarship from the Deutsche Telekom Foundation. In 2019, she was accepted into the Graduate School of Excellence and the LEAD research network at the Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen as an associate doctoral student. She received the Best Poster Award at the LEAD Retreat Fall. From 2020 to 2022, she was a Junior Fellow at the Joachim Herz Foundation's Didaktik:digital program.

Congratulations on the FUTURE EDUCATION PhD Award of the University of Graz, which Salome Flegr received for her dissertation at the 1st FUTURE EDUCATION Conference 2024!

Salome Flegr on researchgate.net

Biography Stefan E. Huber

Stefan E. Huber received his doctorate in physics from the Institute of Ion Physics and Applied Physics at the University of Innsbruck in 2014. He had already completed his master's degree in physics there in 2010. This was followed in 2018 by a Bachelor's degree and finally a Master of Science in Psychology in 2020 - also at the University of Innsbruck.

From 2010 to 2014, he was a project member (PhD student) in the Computational Chemistry research group at the Institute of Ion Physics and Applied Physics at the University of Innsbruck as part of the doctoral program on Computational Interdisciplinary Modelling (FWF DK+ Project Computational Interdisciplinary Modelling (DK-CIM) W1227-N16).

In 2014, he took up a postdoctoral position at the Department of Chemistry at the Technical University of Munich, before moving back to the Institute of Ion Physics and Applied Physics at the University of Innsbruck and the Computational Chemistry research group as a postdoc in early 2015, where he also worked partly in parallel as a research associate at the Institute of Fundamental Engineering Sciences in the Department of Strength of Materials and Structural Analysis.

In 2017, he held a postdoctoral position at the Institute of Ion Physics and Applied Physics at the University of Innsbruck in the Computational Molecular Physics research group, and in 2020 he became a senior assistant at the Institute of Fundamental Engineering Sciences at the University of Innsbruck in the Department of Strength of Materials and Structural Analysis.

In March 2022 he became a lecturer at the Institute of Psychology at the University of Innsbruck and since January 2023 he has been working as a university assistant at the Institute of Psychology at the University of Graz in the Digital Technologies and Psychology Unit.

His research focuses primarily on the following areas

• Cognitive psychology and psychophysiology: analysis of human blinking and gaze behavior; temporal, structural (and fractal) aspects of motor activity, perception and attention; psychophysiological assessment (eye-tracking, ECG, EDA, analysis of facial expression)
• Psychology of memory, learning and education: learning analytics; psychophysiology of learning; game-based learning and educational games
• Computational methods and modeling in psychology and psychophysiology: (non-linear) time series analysis; statistical learning

Congratulations on the FUTURE EDUCATION Paper Award, which Stefan E. Huber received for his publication at the 1st FUTURE EDUCATION Conference 2024!

Stefan E. Huber on ORCID

Stefan E. Huber on Google Scholar

Stefan E. Huber's speech at the FUTURE EDUCATION Award Ceremony 2024:

"I feel honored to be here today, and to be allowed to address you - on this occasion - with a couple of words. I appreciate your kind introduction to our work and I specifically thank you for honoring particularly this paper with this award. A work which, like most if not all scientific works, could only be achieved by joint effort and collaboration. And in this case, I am convinced that it would not exist at all without the indispensable groundwork of my colleagues and coauthors Dr. Rodolpho Cortez, Prof. Kristian Kiili, Antero Lindstedt, and Prof. Manuel Ninaus. So, it seems only fair to me to use some of this time given to me here to acknowledge their contribution, at least with a few words.

So, what was this contribution that made this work possible? Those who know me, also know that before psychology I studied physics and that already back then, I was fascinated by the work of some of the early psychophysicists like Fechner or Weber, discovering fundamental law-like relations in human behavior; and by the fact of discovering them, exemplifying that something invariant enough to call it a natural law may even exist among all the noise and biases of human behavior and action.

And from my perspective, it was nothing less than such a fundamental relation, which my colleagues were after, long before I joined the group. Their specific question was: Is there a genuine effect of game- or playfulness on learning? With many years of experience in game-based learning, they have been well aware that games or elements of them can influence learning in many ways. Yet at the same time, learning is influenced by many other factors, like prior knowledge, or experience with a task or subject, personal dispositions, interests, motives, and many more. And such confounding factors, as we call them, make it very difficult to extract exactly that effect which a bit of added playfulness may exert on learning. However, the learning task and experimental design, which my colleagues had devised, would allow us, maybe not to minimize, but strongly reduce these confounding factors and provide some evidence for such a genuine effect.

In retrospective, the approach seems simple, obvious almost. Devise a learning task in which prior knowledge cannot play a role, which is basic enough not to be specific in relation to any subject domain, and with which learners can engage and disengage neither driven by necessity nor overly rewarded. And present two versions of this task, once in its original form and once with some game elements added to it. And then see what happens.

So, what is it that happens? What does a bit of playfulness do to learning? Let me put it like this. For me, a book is a good book if it makes me want to read more, and other books beyond it. And similarly, I would say that a learning activity is a good one if it fuels my wish to learn more, and many other things beyond it. And I would claim that this is exactly what a little space for playfulness can, under some circumstances, do for learning. In the case of our study, it did not make people learn faster or more efficiently on average. But it helped them stick around a little longer, exploring and seeing through what otherwise they would have abandoned.

Admittedly, one could say that this does not sound like much either. What use does it have educationally that people stick around, play around, maybe just fool around a little longer? Well, for some of them it means that they would learn something which otherwise they would not have. And in general, I would not underestimate the difference a little space for playfulness can make, even if this may only be noticed on rare occasions.

I lack the time to make this last point more explicit. I can only point towards a source that can. A piece[1] more than 80 years of age, composed by an educator named Abraham Flexner, titled "The usefulness of useless knowledge". In this piece, Flexner describes many scientific discoveries not motivated by considerations of utility but by what Einstein[2] called "divine curiosity, play instinct" and "constructive fantasy". My favorite among them, the discovery of electricity and all its consequences hopefully helps us grasp the global scale on which a little space for playful exploration may make a difference.

The future of education will reveal how much and what kind of space for such curiosity and playfulness we can provide in our research and teaching. Yet, I am convinced that this relation goes in both directions, that how much space we can grant those qualities in our education will to a considerable part also determine its future. Thank you."

[1] Flexner, A. (1939). The usefulness of useless knowledge. Harper's Magazine, 179, 544-552.

[2] Einstein, A. (1930). In: Küpper, H. (2023). Sound document of Albert Einstein. Albert Einstein in the world wide web. einstein-website.de/en/sound-document/