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Mats Brunström, Eva Mossberg, Mirela Vinerean
Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, Karlstad University, Sweden
For students aiming for a Bachelor degree in Engineering, the first course in university mathematics can be perceived as anything from a fun and useful tool for technology to a challenging obstacle of incomprehensible gibberish. From a learning perspective, we want as many students as possible to start seeing the structure behind the mathematical formulas and start asking questions like “But what happens if…”. For the autumn semester of 2015, a group of lecturers with previous experiences in web-based education and flipped classroom techniques and research interests in learning using dynamic mathematics software set out to form an updated teaching environment for the beginner’s course in mathematics for all the students at the three-year engineering programs at Karlstad University. Our goals were to increase the awareness among the students about the actual relevance of mathematics for the engineering programs, to stimulate in-depth learning, and to find efficient ways of communicating mathematical knowledge.
We want to share our reasoning, the practicalities, and the outcomes of our course development project where we
developed a series of video presentations of course material, and combined flipped classroom teaching with traditional style lectures and lessons,
used dynamic software for visualization to support the students’ mathematical understanding,
developed task sequences, where students used GeoGebra to investigate mathematical relations, make conjectures, and verify them,
used the developed task sequences as part of the course examination,
discussed the changes and future work both with students and with colleagues.