At the drink at 27th of March, the winners of the Inter-Actief Decentralized Education Awards are announced.

After the Education Committee received many nominations from both TCS and BIT students, three teachers: Harry Aarts, Doina Bucur and Jair Santanna had the opportunity to present something about passion at the Inter-Actief Decentralized Education Awards lunch lecture of the 19th of March.

We started with Harry, being a mathematician, who couldn’t help himself to tell us something about solving puzzles using mathematics. Moreover, he also opened his personal life to us by showing a few pictures of his children playing with a Rubik's cube (and destroying it as a future mathematician). Then we got Doina who told us a bit about her hobby – logic and data. She taught us how to recognize and track bad science. It is always useful to get to know some mistakes in logical assumptions students often make, isn’t it? Finally, we had Jair who is really passionate about the topic of DDoS attacks in general and booters in specific. Therefore, we had a practical lesson of how easy it is to attack a server and why is it a big problem currently on the Internet.

At the IDEA awards drink on 27th of March, the nominated teachers were called in front of the room in order to receive their prizes: Doina Bucur took the 1st prize, Harry Aarts the 2nd and Jair Santanna the 3rd.

About Doina, her students said that she shows love and enthusiasm for her subject; that she keeps a good balance between theory, practice and research; that her courses are very well organized, including very short grading times; and that she is very approachable. Harry is argued to be the best mathematics teacher who shows great motivation to teach and who explains topics very well and in an easily-understandable way. Jair is called a great guy who is always cheerful when explaining his subject. A student even voluntarily attending one of his lectures.

Moreover, the atmosphere was inspiring and “famous” teachers such Klaas Sikkel, Pieter-Tjerk de Boer and Arend Rensink applauded along with students from TCS and BIT. In the end, all three nominated teachers are challenged to play a game of twister with our Officer of Educational Affairs, Lindsay Kempen. Harry Aarts won the game.

The lunch lecture, as well as the IDEA drink, were a success in showing our gratitude towards the professors, as well as inspiring the students they teach every day.