Abstract:

Current engineering problems demand the participation of professionals from various disciplines. Thus, the thought of complexity arises, as a common framework for the training. To construct technological knowledge within the structure of the new epistemological looking of the science, the normative and curricular framework of Mechanical Engineering (ME) career at our University (NTU) is included into a disciplinary and educational context, local and globally. When computational mathematics (CM) emerged because of enormous speed and calculus processing capacity, different experiences with CM for the teaching of Advanced Calculus (AC) signature were implemented. However, its integrator role is not well structured with the upper cycle. Computer integration into engineer grade-formation should surround over four modes: as a communicational tool (storage, transfer and access of information), as a didactic tool (use of software, facilitator of presentation, representation and manipulation), as an integrated tool at professional ambits (specifically linked to discipline) and as a math instrument (to generate creative models, to advance on the architecture of problems).

The CM role in advanced students of ME grade level at NTU was analyzed.
The applied investigation was a hermeneutical-dialectic study. Advanced students of ME from NTU in Rosario city that belonged to 2014-2015-2016 years schedule were participated, who answered a pre-structured questionnaire.

Among advanced students, AC signature was the least approved (38.9%) and/or the least regularized (8.3%). An 86% claimed to have problems with the use of software applied along the AC course, and with insufficient hours of practice with computer. A 52.8% understood technology as a didactical tool, 36% as a tool to facilitate calculations; for few students, technology allowed to reorganize their knowledges. All students had computer and 77.8% of them claimed to have computational understanding. However, by promptly inquiring about these understandings, was noticed that the students confused computational background with programming background; only 18% of students had programming knowledge properly.

Current educational model is non-conducive to the strengthening of the autonomy of institutional actors with the computational tool. Disciplinary blindness prevails, to address the complexity in higher education as an organizational proposal. Hegemonic ideas of a mathematic that bases and gives rationality and universality to explanatory models of reality are actually persisting. An instrumental and procedural vision underlies, that only uses computer as a tool but not as an instrument. It is necessary to set the recursive loop between basic sciences and specific technologies. It is not evident a precise interest in CM like a way of resolution of complex problems in ME fields. The epistemological value of interaction between theory and tool that we access to environment is lost. The CA chair of NTU proposed activities to articulate disciplinary contents through CM and to correct the stated problem.

Keywords:

Computational mathematics, complexity, educational strategy.