Abstract
There are many computational applications and engines used in mathematics, with some of the best-known arguably being Maple, Mathematica, MATLAB, and Mathcad. However, although they are very complete and powerful, they demand the use of commercial licences, which can be a problem for some education institutions or in cases where students desire to use the software on an unlimited number of devices or to access it from several of them simultaneously. In this contribution, we show how GeoGebra, WolframAlpha, Python, and SageMath can be applied to the teaching of different mathematical courses in engineering studies, as they are some of the most interesting representatives of free (and mostly open source) mathematical software. As the best way to show a topic in mathematics is by providing examples, this article explains how to make calculations for some of the main topics associated with Calculus, Algebra, and Coding theories. In addition to this, we provide some results associated with the usage of Mathematica in different graded activities. Moreover, the comparison between the results from students that use Mathematica and students that participate in a “traditional” course, solving problems and attending to master classes, is shown.
Highlights
The Bologna Accord is an agreement on a common model of higher education reached in 1999 that implies the creation of a common European area of university studies
We have focused on GeoGebra, WolframAlpha, Python, and SageMath, because they are free to use, and because as a side effect that freedom allows us to chose the best option for each topic inside a course, preventing educators from being tied to a single solution
This could be interpreted as an indication that, when mathematical software is used at class, students improve their understanding of the contents and obtain better results compared to students that are being taught in the traditional way
Summary
The Bologna Accord is an agreement on a common model of higher education reached in 1999 that implies the creation of a common European area of university studies. We have included data about a statistical study of two academic courses in which we proposed the use of Mathematica (and as an alternative WolframAlpha) as a tool for solving mathematical problems. The rest of this contribution is organized as follows: Section 2 describes other articles associated with this topic.
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