Abstract:

Numerical methods course at universities in Poland is usually carried out using the traditional textbooks. Many years of author experience show that the spoken subject is treated as a difficult and not liked by IT students. In order to support learning theory and programming of numerical methods, the interactive application was introduced during the numerical methods laboratory. The application is the result of the final project of the first degree IT students. It explains and graphically illustrates the most known numerical algorithms. The possibilities of that interactive application was presented last year during INTED2017 conference.

The main goal of this paper is to examine if the application actually supports learning and improves numerical methods teaching process. The article analyses quantitative indicators comparing the effectiveness of learning and level of satisfaction of students benefiting from the educational application. The research was conducted on randomly selected group of Computer Science students. The results have been also developed using a survey. In the survey, students expressed their opinion on the effectiveness of learning using the educational application in comparison to traditional teaching methods.

Keywords:

Effectiveness of learning, interactive application.