FACEBOOK AS A MOTIVATION AND SUPPORT TOOL FOR THE TEACHING OF MATHEMATICS IN ENGINEERING DEGREES

Training students to learn new methods and theories, provide the basis for autonomous learning, training them to solve problems and make creative decisions and critical thinking are basic objectives of the new degrees in engineering. To achieve this, in first years of a degree, we find some Mathematics subject with necessary contents for the rational comprehension of other disciplines of the degree. Although the contents are not always previously known, it is interesting to have studied mathematics at the pre-university levels, since in this way the student is already used to the mathematical language used. However, in recent years the teaching staff of these subjects has found a handicap, the low level of mathematical knowledge with which the student accesses to these degrees. These difficulties mean that the student is faced these subjects with a not very positive aptitude, causing a disconnection between the students and these subjects, which translates into having a high percentage of not presented students in the official calls.

Immersed in the 21st century, it is obvious that we must change our way of teaching. In the university environment, multiple e-learning solutions have been implemented, including virtual teaching platforms that can be used as a communication mechanism between students and teachers; however we have found that as a means of interaction their use is very limited. In view of the foregoing, we have established the use of one of the technological resources with greater implementation among university students, social networks, and in particular, the most widely used, Facebook. Note that this social network has the advantage of being free and accessible from smartphones and tables. In addition, its versatility is based on the fact that there is no limitation of characters, and on the other hand, it allows a better follow-up of the users who use it, so that the teachers can follow up on the students who have access to the information.

The main objective that we set ourselves at the beginning of our project was the use of the social network Facebook as a tool that complements the teaching-learning process and brings closer the mathematics subjects of engineering degrees to students, solving the disconnection between some students and the mathematics and giving vitality and enthusiasm to the tutorial action.

In this work we show that, despite not having elapsed too much time since the beginning of the use of this tool, the use of Facebook has allowed to increase the interaction teacher-student and student-student outside the classroom and has played a fundamental role as a motivation and attraction tool for students, digital natives, who were mostly users of this social network beforehand. In this way, the use of this social network has been accepted by students as a new instrument that allows the improvement of the learning of our subjects.