Abstract:

The Slovak University of Agriculture (SUA) in Nitra has a specific position in Slovakia because it is the only of this kind in our country. It was founded in 1952 by separating from the College of Agricultural and Forestry Engineering in Košice under the name “High School of Agriculture”. In 1996 it was renamed to SUA in Nitra. At present it consists of 6 faculties. One of them is the Faculty of Engineering of SUA in Nitra.

Some phenomena and properties can be described by functions and their derivatives. This description can be expressed by equations that can contain variables x and y and their derivatives and are called differential equations of n-th order, where the order of the differential equation is determined by the highest derivative present in the equation.

With the concept and solution of differential equations only students of the Faculty of Engineering are directly acquainted in the subject of Mathematics for Technicians. Since the scope of this subject is very limited, they learn only certain types of these equations. Students should learn to solve these types of differential equations and should be able to use them to solve some applied problems.

We set two goals in our paper. The first is to find examples of use of differential equations in different science disciplines that students of our university study at their faculties. The second goal is to verify the level of acquired knowledge in differential equations at students of the Faculty of Engineering.

In order to accomplish these goals, we used research and analysis of professional "non-mathematical" literature and mathematical descriptive statistical methods. We found that if a student was successful in solving differential equations, he was also successful in the final test, but we did not confirm that if a student was able to solve one type of differential equation, he could also solve another types.

Keywords:

Differential equations, mathematical education, applied problems, average, correlation.