The Informatics Circle is our network for all lecturers of the first-year courses in informatics and business informatics. Its regular meetings continue what began with “Learning Patterns”, a workshop held within the Start Informatik program (2016-2018). The initiative is coordinated by Sascha Hunold and receives financial support by the vice-rector for teaching through his focus:lehre program.

Our Mission

Since we launched the Informatics Circle in 2018, together with our senior lecturers and lecturers in mandatory first-year courses, we have created the mission for the first-year course program. Its main objectives are:

• a common theme for the first year of study
• a universal didactics concept that still provides didactical diversity
• to continually improve our first-year course program
• a fruitful collaboration amongst our teachers
• joint teaching activities

Our Meetings

In our biannual half-day meetings, we discuss good practice examples and take a closer look at the individual modules of the first-year programs to foster a better mutual understanding of their objectives and to identify overlaps in content. But we also look at the administrative aspects of teaching: the deans or academic affairs report on current developments in matters of study law and give an outlook on planned organizational changes.

What happened so far

In summer 2019, we dedicated the meeting to the courses “Denkweisen der Informatik” (Peter Purgathofer) and “Algorithmen und Datenstrukturen” (Stefan Szeider, Martin Kronegger); in winter 2019, we focussed on the modules in mathematics: “Algebra und Diskrete Mathematik (Gerhard Dorfer), “Analysis” (Bernhard Gittenberger), and “Analysis 2” (Alois Panholzer). Due to SARS-Cov2, the summer 2020 meeting was canceled.