George Kinnear

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Dr. George Kinnear is an Edinburgh local, whose latent wish to help people has led to him becoming a lecturer in Technology-Enhanced Mathematics Education and a researcher in the field of mathematics education at the University of Edinburgh.

He seemed to have an interest in the subject from primary all the way through to high school, where he got particularly interested in computing. From there, a nudge from his teacher who had studied at the University of Edinburgh, was all it took for him to pursue the subject at the same location and get an MA in Pure Mathematics. Having found his interest, he stuck around for his PhD in Analysis. “Essentially, it was to show that some numbers are bigger than other numbers,” he says of the topic for his thesis and, recalling the process, he speaks of a summary he had to write that could be followed by someone who didn’t have a background in mathematics. “I was thinking my mum and dad, basically, they're the only other people who have a copy of this,” he adds while gladly remembering that his dad was able to follow the point of it.

 While he did his PhD, he tutored on the side and realised he enjoyed the teaching process more than the pure mathematics research that he was doing. Just after getting his doctorate he found himself in a recruitment job at the University that allowed for interactions with prospective students as well as a lecturing opportunity in education. When asked about the transition into a teaching job, he starts reminiscing about his secondary school days when he used to be eager to help his fellow students, “I took all my notes that I was writing at school and typed them all up and had a website that I was running.” So, there was always a will to help, and that seemed to finally take shape in him finding a teaching job in education, where he could directly impact students’ learning experiences.

His current research focuses on how students learn mathematics. Specifically, he is involved in looking into computer-based assessments and optimising systems that students use to answer questions online, such as STACK (something which all of us doing maths have found ourselves using at one point or another).

The field having changed so rapidly in the last couple of decades, he reflects on how that technological advancement has led to the development of more powerful tools that can be used in education and how the convenience that comes with it is something that is easy to get accustomed to. “We get used to all these things fairly rapidly, but actually even looking back to the year 2000, the landscape was so different.”

He believes the current online assessment environment is pretty useful since huge amounts of data are very easily accessible to hundreds of students, though there’s some uncertainty as to how to improve it.

Looking into the future of online learning, especially with the current context of Covid-19, he says there’s been a lot more interest in the field over the summer. He and some of his colleagues are being funded to develop workbooks into interactive STACK material, which they expect to make available to other Universities by the end of the academic year. He also helped conduct workshops during the summer to familiarise other teachers with STACK; since everyone realised they would soon be relying heavily on it.

Speaking of where he’s heading with his research in particular, he says he is still in the exploratory phase. Though he mentions creating a research agenda with a group of people, including Professor Chris Sangwin who developed STACK, in order to develop computer aided assessments further. This would be by talking to teachers who have to interact with it and conducting experiments to see where they can make it more beneficial. “So, I think that’d keep me busy for next few years while I kind of figure out what I want to do, when I’m grown up.”