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Katarína Bachratá 1, Hynek Bachratý1, Iveta Jančigová2
1Department of Software Technologies, Faculty of Management Science and Informatics, University of Žilina, Slovakia,
2Department of Mathematical Methods and Operations Research, Faculty of Management Science and Informatics, University of Zilina, Slovakia
One of the common misconceptions in teaching of mathematics is that since the fundamentals of mathematics basically do not change (and when they do, it is not usually at the level taught to undergraduate engineering students), there is no need to change the current mathematical courses that work reasonably well. We claim the opposite - that the approach to teaching mathematics should be very adaptive for several reasons.
One reason is that the cohorts of incoming students vary – both in attitude to mathematics, e.g. apprehension, fear, etc. and in their mathematical background. Also the fields they are preparing for are constantly changing (especially so in Computer Science). It is our task to help them learn those topics and adequate level of detail that they will need for their future study and professional work.
Therefore, we have put the emphasis on teaching mathematical thinking, identification and formulation of questions and on problem solving strategies, not just exact mathematical theories, facts and formulas. At the same time we try to instill the notion that mathematics is one of the most helpful tools they will use in the future and not a necessary hindrance. The learning should be based on the students’ previous life-experience and directly relevant to their primary field of study instead of being a disconnected theoretical area. We should also adaptively use technology already familiar to the students that will support our teaching of mathematics instead of becoming another topic to learn.
In this work, we discuss these principles, provide the theoretical background (learning phases and theory of generic models) and illustrate them on examples taken from an undergraduate course Mathematics for Computer Science.