Abstract:

This paper proposes the use of educational videos and Matlab to help first-year engineering students to understand the conic sections, combining the flipped classroom methodology with ICTs such as Matlab.

This is an exploratory study performed with 27 participants, first-year engineering students enrolled in an analytic geometry course. Before each session, the students watch videos in which the teacher explains the mathematical concepts. During the classes the teacher reviews these concepts and the students complete a Matlab program to calculate all the conic elements. At the end of each session the students solve and submit an exercise.

During the intervention, the students have achieved a good understanding of the elements of conics, participated more actively in the construction of their knowledge and visualized abstract concepts. After the intervention, the participants fulfilled a satisfaction questionary. 86% of the participants consider that following the proposed methodology has been very important to understand the topic, and they would like to use the same method with other topics of the subject.

The main contribution of the work is the methodology used as a teaching-learning resource at university level. The results of the satisfaction questionary show the high impact that the methodology has caused on the students’ perception of the subject.

Keywords:

Conic sections, Matlab programming, Teaching of mathematics, Video.