Abstract:

Over the last years, the Federal Council of Engineering Deans from Argentina (Consejo Federal de Decanos de Facultades de Ingeniería, CONFEDI) has been working on identifying the skills engineers should have and linked them with what society requires from them to have a sustainable development approach.

CONFEDI suggests that every engineer should not only know but also should know how to do. This can’t be achieved just by developing knowledge, for it is the result of a knowledge, skill and expertise mixture.

Subjects in the first years of Engineering careers can make important contributions on the skill development process. Based on this idea, at Facultad Regional San Nicolás, Universidad Tecnológica Nacional, Argentina, Numerical Analysis faculty proposed scenarios that would benefit the development of mathematical skills in the classroom.

The development of mathematical skills in students is a process which is planned and conducted by the professor. Therefore, so as students can achieve expertise on a certain skill being aware of their knowledge, it is necessary to plan and organize the teaching process considering that the performing of a particular action has the development of a certain mathematical skill as purpose.

In order to help students to develop different mathematical skills during the learning of numerical methods, teaching sequences were designed using technological resources created for this aim. In these situations, students not only have to remember or apply a certain numerical method, but also analyze when it is possible to be applied depending on the characteristics of the proposed problem.

This paper intends to share the experience developed in a Numerical Analysis course while teaching the issue Interpolation Methods. The tools designed for the experience will be presented, together with the sequence of activities assigned to students in order to develop specific mathematical abilities. Examples of activities that will be used for assessing the development of mathematical skills and the rubrics related are also shown.

Keywords:

Mathematical skills, numerical methods, interpolation methods.