Rami Luisto

Teaching

I enjoy teaching and I have lectured several courses in the universities of Helsinki, Jyväskylä and UCLA. Together with Juulia Lahdenperä we have lectured courses with an experimental method called dialogue teaching. Besides university pedagogics I am interested in making mathematics more accessible to people not studying mathematics at the university level. During my undergraduate studies at the University of Helsinki I was strongly involved with the Summamutikka organization that functions under the national LUMA center to organize, among other things, mathematical events for people from the ages 6 to 18.

A symbol with many circles. Inside the blue image boundary circles we have a central circle, surrounded by a set of six circles, which in turn are extended by six more circles. Lines connect many of the central points.

I aim to use modern tools for teaching, especially in demonstrations and visualizations, whenever applicable. I firmly believe that many students benefit from being able to play around with concrete tools, particularly in the beginning phase of their studies. I strongly recommend both GeoGebra and Desmos as easy to learn software that can be freely used in teaching. For example, two tools made with GeoGebra: first one to demonstrate Thale's theorem, and the second one to study the intersection angle of two lines constructed from a rectangle, and two more tools made in Desmos: first one to help the students study sums of wave functions and another demonstrating Gibb's phenomenon. Each one of these examples can be prepared by a novice user in less than fifteen minutes.

Besides GeoGebra and Desmos, I have also interest and experience in using the Stack system in Moodle as Computer Aided Assesment (CAA). Anyone who has taught courses in calculus or basic analysis knows that there are many types of excercises which are useful training for the students, but very mechanical to check and solve for a teacher. Stack offers one solution to streamline this process.

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