Abstract:

Six Higher Education Institutions (HEI), from different European countries (Estonia, Ireland, Poland, Portugal, Romania, and Spain) joined forces in 2018 to launch a shared Erasmus+ Project under the Key Action - Cooperation for innovation and the exchange of good practices. The project's “heart and soul” was to provide an online course on fundamental mathematical themes that would serve as a base for the specialized domain of engineering mathematics. Upon its approval and funding, partner institutions have developed a common platform for students and professors interested in Fundamentals of Linear Algebra and engineering applications. A mathematics on-line learning model was developed from the scratch and is now available in seven different languages. As presented in the project proposal, the student competition activity was introduced as a Learning/Teaching/Training activity (LTT) and it was established inside the online course setting and framework to add an international dimension to the studies of the enrolled students. The students’ competition in EngiMath project, connected learners from different countries through common tasks. It has settled an open international space, where students could deal with assessment “stresses” in an indirect and ludic manner, promoting, in a gamification way, their self-confidence when dealing with on-line tasks, tight schedules or even “against the clock”, motivating them to complete the course and to avoid drop out behaviour. Despite all of the pandemic limitations that all partner members had to cope with, the students' competition can be considered one of the Project's main triumphs.

Keywords:

Mathematics, Online learning, Competition, Gamification, Multinational cooperation, Erasmus+, Technology enhanced learning.