“Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler”
This year’s Golden Owl teaching award goes to Johan Gaume, Professor of Alpine Mass Movements at ETH Zurich and SLF Davos. Through hands-on experiments, blackboard derivations and simulations, he brings the physics of granular materials like sand and snow vividly to life. For him, teaching and learning are driven by passion, curiosity and enjoyment.
Professor Gaume, congratulations on winning the "Golden Owl"! What does good teaching mean to you?
Thank you, it is really an honour. For me, good teaching starts with passion. When I am excited about a topic, I hope students feel it too – learning becomes enjoyable. I teach subjects closely connected to our research, which allows me to share simple experiments that reveal surprisingly complex behavior in materials like snow or sand. Seeing curiosity spark in the classroom is one of the best parts of the job.
Good teaching also means making knowledge accessible without oversimplifying it. I use contextual slides, hands-on experiments and blackboard derivations – I am a big fan of the blackboard – to show where equations come from. Students also work on numerical projects simulating real events. The goal is to build intuition and understand why these mechanical processes matter.
Another key aspect is listening. Our courses are quite new, and student feedback has been essential in improving them. I am a scientist, not a trained teacher, so constructive criticism is always welcome. And I must thank our teaching assistants – this award is theirs as well. When we launched these courses in 2023, we started from scratch: no exercises, no exams, no slides, no lecture notes. The TAs played a vital role in shaping them.
Is there a particular experiment or classroom moment that has contributed most to your success as a lecturer?
In our Granular Mechanics course, for instance, we study sand – a material that is everywhere, the second most used resource in the world, yet still not fully understood. Is sand a solid or fluid? To explore this, we run simple experiments: building sandcastles, triggering sand avalanches on 3D-printed landscapes, or demonstrating “sand magic” like squeezing a jar filled with dense sand and water and watching the water level drop instead of rise. These moments make complex physics tangible.
What would you like students to take away from your course – not just in terms of knowledge, but in how they think or approach problems?
Above all, critical thinking: about the physical world, the models we use to describe it, and even the teacher. I tell students to watch what I write on the board, as I can make mistakes too and I am glad when they spot them.
Beyond understanding the fundamental mechanics we study, I want them to learn how to tackle complex problems: to make sound assumptions, use physical reasoning, and identify appropriate simplifications. In our field, we deal with highly complex natural processes, and designing practical engineering solutions requires defining the right balance between realism and simplicity. On that aspect, I am often guided by a quote attributed to Albert Einstein: “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.”