Who works in the Mathematical Environmental Laboratory?

Pupils with special scientific talents, student teachers of mathematics and students from the environmental sciences work together in small working groups on project-oriented questions in the mathematical environmental laboratory.

What topics does the Mathematical Environmental Laboratory deal with?

Topics from the environmental sciences that also require mathematical modeling to solve the problem are chosen as questions. In terms of content, the subject area can be narrowed down to spatially explicit risk assessment in the environmental sciences, which is then processed using geographic information systems (GIS) and analyzed using statistical tools.

Rooms

Mathematical Environmental Laboratory Building I 0.07

Modeling room I 0.06

Use of computers

In order to keep the costs for the implementation of the mathematical environmental laboratory as low as possible, open source tools are used as far as possible, which on the one hand meet professional requirements and on the other hand are available to all participants free of charge on their home PC.

Collection of teaching materials

Further information on the teaching materials collection of the Institute of Mathematics.

The aim of the mathematical environmental laboratory is to create a teaching and learning environment in which student teachers of mathematics, students studying for a degree in environmental sciences and pupils with special scientific talents work together in small working groups on research questions.

Cooperation between the group members

• Student teachers with an interest in environmentally relevant issues benefit from authentic learning environments with pupils, as well as from the expertise of environmental science students.
• Pupils with special aptitudes in the natural sciences benefit from student teachers if they have no previous knowledge of mathematics from the basic lectures and from the specialist skills of the environmental science students.
• Students from the environmental sciences with a strong interest in modeling for research-based problems benefit from student teachers in the area of mathematical modeling and didactics, as well as from the pupils with regard to their competencies in the logical area of problem solving.

What contribution do the target groups make?

• Student teachers are important for the working group in order to didactically prepare mathematical content in such a way that environmental scientists and student teachers can compensate for a lack of mathematical skills and to be able to integrate the mathematical knowledge gained into the problem solving of the environmental science topic in a goal-oriented manner.

• Through their contributions, environmental science students enable an authentic, problem-oriented approach to risk management, in which mathematical tools from modeling are to be used by student teachers from mathematics. They support the mathematicians in the interdisciplinary aspects of mathematical modeling.

• Pupils learn to engage in research into current environmental science issues. They enable prospective mathematics teachers to gain authentic teaching and learning experience in the project area and to deepen their didactic support of mathematical learning processes.

Dipl. Ing. Matthias Größler (Supervision of Spatial Logistic Optimization, GIS)

Dr. Jörg Rapp, Mathematics (Supervision of Spatial Ecotoxicology, GIS)