The 2022 Sawyer Dialing Prize went to Frans Maes "for his creation of an introductory course on dialing, built on the idea of supervised self-study; for his successful multi-year running of that course in Europe; and for his inspiration of NASS’ development of a North American version.”

Fred presented Frans with an award certification, the traditional cash prize of $250 and a custom made Spectra Sundial by Jim Tallman of Artisan Industrials.

Frans Maes - https://www.artisanindustrials.com/world-of-sundials/spectra-sundial-nijmegen-netherlands.html

Frans acknowledged the Sawyer Dialing Prize with two short video presentations. He thanked Fred and NASS for being awarded this year's Sawyer Dialing Prize saying "of course I'm honored and I'm flattered to be considered to join the league of so many great dialists that won the Prize before. I'm also proud to be the third Dutchman that was awarded this prize. Fer de Vries was the first awardee in 2000 and Hendrik Hollander in 2005." 25 years ago, Frans was looking for ways to embellish his backyard and someone suggested a sundial. "I didn't know anything of sundials, so I looked around for information and I found Waugh's book (Sundials - Their Theory and Construction) on my own bookcase... it made interesting reading and the sundial type that appealed to me was the analemmatic sundial... I liked most that you have to do something to read the time." He joined the Netherlands Sundial Society, and wrote about his sundial. Some years ago, while listening to presentation about a very interesting sundial, that included Babylonian and Italian hours, he hear someone ask: "Mister speaker, please can you explain what Italian hours are?...[and] I thought: what we do need is a form of internal education,...because if you know more of a subject, it makes it more interesting." Frans decided to write a course that included self assessment questions to force students not only to read the text, but to internalize the concepts. And a final submittal question "not necessarily a difficult question, but: no answer, no new lesson." Thus Frans Maes began writing lessons and sending them out to students. NASS has now used his material to create a similar course centered on North America, but still following the style of assessment questions and a final submitted question to proceed to the next lesson. Frans Maes, your dedication to educating people about sundials has now gone international.