Dan O'Brien
In addition to Hitchin Boys' School, I also attended Charterhouse before entering the sixth form (1989-1992) and was one of the Hitchin Boys' School cohort who attended Eton College Universities' Summer School in 1993 - under the auspices of Keith Allard.
As an undergraduate between 1994 and 1997, I read Natural Sciences at Christ's College, University of Cambridge, after switching from Computer Science in my second year - and ended up specialising in Astrophysics for Part II of my degree (third year). Other subjects studied in Part I were Mathematics, Physics and History and Philosophy of Science.
Between 2009 and 2010, I trained to be a secondary maths teacher at Goldsmiths, University of London - where I gained my PGCE.
Between 2020 and 2021, during the COVID-19 pandemic, I completed my MA in Mathematics Education at the UCL Institute of Education. My main research project was on the knowledge of mathematics service teachers at undergraduate level. I also conducted empirical research on digital technology in mathematics education.
Between 2021 and 2024, I have been actively researching Extended Reality (XR) technology in mathematics education and presenting on and (co-)authoring papers on the usage of Augmented Reality (AR) in this context in particular.
I have just been awarded an Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) Doctoral Training Partnership (DTP) studentship to read for a PhD at the Centre for Mathematical Cognition at Loughborough University in October 2024. I will be researching AR and Virtual Reality (VR) technology in upper secondary mathematics education.