Queen Mary School of Engineering and Materials Science second-year undergraduate student Yash Vaghela has been successful in securing the Student Enhanced Engagement and Development (SEED) Award from the Queen Mary Academy for his significant contributions as a student research assistant on a co-creational mathematics and engineering education project supervised by Dr Rehan Shah.

Yash was one of three undergraduate students who played an active role in the co-creation of a Python Common Errors and Practice Questions toolkit to help new incoming first-year students studying EMS412 with additional guidance and support with Python, particularly those with no previous programming experience. The piloted toolkit has already received an overwhelmingly positive reception from students with over 190 responses on its feedback survey with comments such as "The practice questions are really useful, they allowed me to understand Python in a context outside of the Jupiter Hub environment" and "The toolkit was very organised, and I felt that I could independently go through the activities without any problems".

The panel commended his application stating "This is a strong project that addresses students' needs and aims to fill a gap in support and has had a measurable impact on your peers. It’s great to see how you’ve made an effort to address different levels in your sessions. Well done!"

Yash is part of the Queen Mary Centre for Undergraduate Research and in addition to his education research work, has also done significant work with Dr Shah on a technical applied mathematics project on 'The Dynamics of Swing Pumping'. He will disseminate his work on the Python toolkit at the upcoming Student Engagement Conference at the University of Westminster in Feb 2025 and will also be involved in presenting the work at the UK and Ireland Engineering Education Research Network Annual Symposium in July 2025 with Dr Shah and his peers.