Interdisciplinary team of H-BRS wins Best Paper Award

Karl Kirschner, Katharina Seuser, Susanne Keil and Christine Siefer from Hochschule Bonn-Rhein-Sieg (H-BRS) have won this year's "Best Paper Award" of the international conference on engineering education – IEEE EDUCON. Chosen from 654 total submissions, their paper, entitled "Teaching Technical Journalism with an Engineering Foundation," represents the most innovative education paper of this year’s conference. Submitted to the panel "Inclusion and Diversity in Engineering Education", the paper presents their didactic concept for merging journalism and engineering education, explaining how basic knowledge in engineering, science and technical journalism are combined in the student project technikjournal.de.

In this project, students learn to write multimedia articles that cover current technical topics and to draw upon their knowledge in mechanical engineering, electrical engineering and computer science that they acquired while at H-BRS. To achieve this, students must report on technology through texts, videos, graphics, audios and some social media channels. While their article’s goals are to present technical topics in an understandable manner to a broad audience, the students learn about professional state-of-the-art reporting, interviewing experts and journalistic criteria.

The necessity for students to integrate different disciplines into their work also requires an interdisciplinary team of lecturers. The former holder of the International Chair at the H-BRS, Karl Kirschner – an American who holds a doctorate in chemistry and is a lecturer in the Department of Computer Science – contributed his scientific expertise to the team from 2017-2019. Under his guidance, the students increasingly wrote their articles in English. Professors Katharina Seuser and Susanne Keil, from the Department of Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering and Technical Journalism (EMT), contribute their technical journalistic expertise. The students also benefit from the practical media experience of Christine Siefer, a journalist and research assistant in the Department of EMT.

The technikjournal project is not only extensively evaluated each semester, but also scientifically monitored, including gender aspects. For example, a comparison of the students' reporting with that in German and international quality newspapers has shown that more female experts are quoted in the articles.

The EDUCON 2020 conference occurred from April 27 to 30. This year’s motto was "Engineering Education for the Future in a Multicultural and Smart World". EDUCON was scheduled to be hostedin Porto this year, but instead was held online due to the Sar-CoV-2 pandemic. Katharina Seuser and Karl Kirschner gave the paper’s presentation online from their respective home offices.