Resumen

CRUZ, Cipriano. Teaching mathmodelling in engineering. Rev. Fac. Ing. UCV [online]. 2010, vol.25, n.3, pp.39-46. ISSN 0798-4065.

The essential goals of Mathematical Education are: (1) find coherent explanations on how people learn maths, and (2) generate efficient teaching-learning proposals to satisfy the goals stated in the curriculum. This article addresses the way to consider various fundamentals in maths teaching. The idea is to focus the design of teaching experiences aimed at developing engineering students in contextual mathmodelling. This is regarded not only as a process of bidirectional work among contextual activities and mathematics content structures, but also towards the development of the student’s necessary skills to obtain a first approximation to the “design method,” understood as the habitual work of an engineer. Conceptual aspects such as mathmodelling, contextualization, and design in engineering, and relation issues among these concepts are taken into account. The study presents some analysis and various procedures related to the design of teaching experiences that take into account contents, development of mathematical and strategic thinking, both oriented to the use of the mathmodelling design.

Palabras clave : Mathmodelling; Maths teaching for engineers; Design in engineering; Mathematical thinking; Strategic thinking.