Professor Silvestre Pinho has been awarded a President’s Award for Excellence in Teaching.

The awards, which recognise outstanding teaching quality, organisation and presentation, were presented during a virtual ceremony on Tuesday 16 June.

Silvestre, who teaches on the Structural Mechanics and Dynamics module, was recognised in particular for his efforts in developing an ibook with interactive teaching content. The ibook combines lecture notes with videos, gifs and interactive animations. The graphics in the ibook allow students to interactively test and solve mathematical problems.

Professor Pinho, who is the Department’s Head of Structures said “I’m very happy to be recognised in this way – especially after all the hard work that went into developing the ibook. Of course, it wasn’t just down to me, so I’d like to thank the students who have helped me to put together this learning resource.”

Silvestre explains how the ibook was developed over the last three summers, with the assistance of a number of students: “Jacob Holford, Florian Villain, Pandanlei Zhu, Hang Song and Branco Arsenov created several interactive visualisations using Javascript within their UROP projects during the summer of 2018. During the summer of 2019, Elizabeth Oon, Liangyu Han, Chong Lien and Constança Rosas build on the previous work and created the interactive visualisations in these notes, the videos, and transferred everything into an epub format. Caroline Clewley, through her Imperial Visualisations project, was, together with Cyd Cowley, very influential for the development of the interactive visualisations.”

Professor Paul Robinson, Head of Department of Aeronautics, said of Professor Pinho’s award: “Silvestre is a truly first-rate teacher and has developed outstanding materials for use in his teaching. It's great that he has received this college recognition for his teaching excellence, and I am sure everyone across the Department will want to congratulate him on this very well-deserved award.”

 Find out more about the President's Awards for Excellence.