File photo: Leon Lestrade/African News Agency (ANA) File photo: Leon Lestrade/African News Agency (ANA)
Cape Town – Minister of Higher Education and Training Naledi Pandor will officially open UWC's Computational and Mathematical Sciences Centre on Tuesday.
On November 13 at the Bellville campus, the centre brings the Mathematics and Applied Mathematics, Statistics and Populations Studies, Computer Science and Information Technology departments together into a single teaching space designed to accommodate up to 1 000 students and fuel the interdisciplinary thinking needed to fuel the Fourth Industrial Revolution.
The Fourth Industrial Revolution is a revolution in the way we work, live and play, fuelled by the unlimited possibilities of billions of people connected by mobile devices, with unprecedented processing power, storage capacity, and access to knowledge.
The revolution will rely on groundbreaking research in a variety of fields - and the state-of-the-art CAMS building is designed to foster interdisciplinary collaboration.
The building provides a link between two of UWC’s most collaborative faculties: the Faculty of Natural Sciences and the Faculty of Economic and Management Sciences. Not only does it house departments from both faculties – it's also situated directly between the main buildings of the faculties on campus.
Department head of the Statistics and Population Studies, Professor Nancy Stiegler, said this new infrastructure allows the department to work in a modern environment with well-equipped computer laboratories, where students can benefit from good teaching in state of the art learning facilities.
“The space offered in the labs gives students the opportunity to better focus on the work with better access to computers. Students are extremely proud of their new environment.
The proximity with collaborating departments makes co-operation and research easier - and the closeness to the Life Sciences Building allows us to feel like we still belong to the big Natural Sciences family,” Stiegler said.
Mathematics and Applied Mathematics head of department Professor Kailash Patidar says the new building is more conducive to teaching and learning.
The design of new undergraduate and postgraduate labs gives ample opportunities for healthy interactions that students and lecturers can have now.
“There are fewer distractions to staff as there are no classrooms in the office wings - the new building also gives us a better opportunity to interact with other departments due to proximity and central location,” he said.
Earlier this year UWC became the first university in South Africa to offer an accredited postgraduate diploma in e-skills with an Immersive Technologies Stream, which incorporates augmented and virtual reality.
The programme, along with EON Technologies, is a collaboration with UWC’s Faculty of Economic and Management Sciences and Faculty of Natural Sciences.
The objective of facilitating an immersive technology-based knowledge transfer for education, edutainment and industry partnerships is to create, share and collaborate virtual three-dimensional learning platforms across a broad range of disciplines.