Three undergraduate students Ms Malmi Mahagamage and Ms Meherun Soud (second-year) and Mr Ilanthiraiyan Sivagnanamoorthy (third-year) have been successful in securing the Student Enhanced Engagement and Development (SEED) Award from the Queen Mary Academy for their significant contributions as student research assistants on co-creational mathematics and engineering education projects supervised by Dr Rehan Shah.

Malmi and Meherun both gained experience with mathematics curriculum development designing resources to help students recognise how mathematics can directly contribute to addressing sustainability and ethical issues. As student researchers working on the project titled 'Embedding sustainability and ethics in mathematics modules', they painstakingly created visually appealing posters featuring images and QR codes comprising mathematical problems and solutions with their key sustainability and ethical considerations clearly highlighted. The developed resources have also been piloted to students in Dr Shah's first and second year undergraduate mathematics modules EMS412 and EMS506. The panel commended their work stating "This is an excellent application in which students took their real-world study experience and proactively applied it to their thinking when re-imagining this learning topic. This piece of work has been very collaborative, and furthermore now features in the taught curriculum of several QMUL modules. The student and their academic collaborator have made efforts to monitor impact of change, and the work has been presented more widely as an example of good practice." They also presented their work at the London Student Sustainability Conference at the University of Westminster in Feb 2025 and at the poster showcase for the QMUL Festival of Education in June 2025.

Ilan, on the other hand, played an instrumental 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". He directly drew upon his own initial struggles learning Python and incorporated commonly made mistakes like confusing semantics, persistent logical errors, and misconceptions. He also oversaw the handbook's overall layout, ensuring sections were logically organised, self-contained, and progressed along a difficulty continuum. Furthermore, the questions he drafted were specifically designed to help students cross these conceptual thresholds, enabling them to approach Python problems with greater confidence. The panel were exceedingly impressed by his work stating that "the impact of this Python Toolkit, has been really tremendous on the student experience. The student has brought their experience and the experience of other students’ and peers into this project. There is clear maturity in reflecting on the strengths that have been gained from undertaking this project and the wider impact on the teaching and learning community is also evident." Ilan was able to showcase his work at a number of conferences including the QMCUR Undergraduate Research Forum in Aug 2024, the CREME-EECS staff Education Scholarship Exchange Webinar in Nov 2024, the SEMS Industrial Liaison Forum in March 2025 where the work received the Best Poster Prize, the QMUL Festival of Educationin June 2025 and the UK&I Engineering Education Research Network Conference at the University of Manchester in July 2025.

In addition to this, Ilan was specially selected by Queen Mary Academy as one of three recipients of the prestigious annual SEED Prize for the academic year 2024-25 winning a £50 voucher. He was also offered support to work with Dr Shah and Queen Mary Academy to apply for SEDA's Student Partnership Impact Award as an international recognition of students who have had impact at their universities relating to Educational Development.

Dr Shah was extremely proud of all his students for their painstaking contributions, stating that "these students with their enthusiasm, commitment and dedication have emerged as the true impact highlights" of these projects.