Abstract:

At university level in general, and in engineering education in particular, students interest in mathematics subjects has dropped worryingly. In Spain, this lack of interest is more noticeable in the university centres located in military schools, where students focus their motivation and effort on their training as officers in the Armed Forces.

To recover the attention and motivation in Mathematics of the students of the Defence University Centre in the Spanish Naval Academy, we developed a teaching innovation project aiming to show the importance of mathematical reasoning as a vehicle in the resolution of real problems, applied in different areas of the training of this type of students.

In this work, we will present the activities and teaching experiences planned in the project. The workshops used a traditional approach, but were based on problems outside the usual field of the subjects to capture and engage the students. We will show the dynamics carried on Calculus I and Calculus II and Differential Equations, taught in the 1st and 2nd year of the degree, respectively.

In the first subject, we held a workshop in the classroom where the aim was to present and apply the concepts of derivation and integration of real functions to real values, as well as their geometric interpretation, to explain and understand basic and simple phenomena in Physics such as the trajectory or position of an object, its speed and acceleration, as a function of the independent variable time. In the second subject, we carried out an evaluable activity outside the classroom in which the aim was to see the applicability of the resolution of systems of homogeneous differential equations using Lanchester's laws, applied to confrontations between military forces based on real records of war conflicts in the 20th century.

We will show the results obtained from the analysis of the final surveys, establishing that these were positive experiences for the students, highlighting the applicability of mathematical tools in their field of work. Likewise, we observed a slight improvement in the academic results related to the concepts and questions studied in the workshops.

Keywords:

Teaching innovation, engineering, mathematics.