A Mathematical Modelling Unit for First-Year Engineering Students

Abstract

This paper is practice-oriented and reports on a mathematical modelling unit specifically developed for first-year engineering students in a South African context. The main idea with the unit was to foster students’ mathematical modelling competency development. This idea supports an essential goal of mathematics teaching, that is to enable students to solve real - world problems by means of mathematics. The unit consists of five lessons and several tasks, carefully planned to consider students’ mathematical pre-knowledge, the demands of the first-year mathematics (calculus) curriculum and the intended competency development. The unit was linked to the mathematical topic of functions and taught for different groups of students according to two different teaching designs, similar to the designs used in the German DISUM project. 144 first year engineering students from the extended curriculum programme of a large public university were divided in three groups and exposed to the unit. An empirical evaluation of the intervention (with a pre-post-test design) showed a significant competency growth for all groups, with substantial differences, dependent on the teaching design. Some strengths and shortcomings of the unit will be identified and implications for future practice will be discussed.

Keywords

• estudiantes de primer año de ingeniería
• competencia en modelización matemática
• unidad de modelización matemática
• problemas del mundo real
• diseño de enseñanza