Best teaching practices in the first year of the pilot implementation of the project DrIVE-MATH

Abstract

Abstract The Fourth Industrial Revolution era has arrived, according to the World Economic Forum. Everything is changing (viz., artificial intelligence, automation, intelligent robots, self-driving cars and genetic editing) and exciting opportunities accompanied with major challenges come to the surface. On the other hand, major difficulties may also rise, namely technological unemployment and poverty. How can governments, educators and parents prepare the present and future generations to thrive in this increasingly changing world? What is the Education of the Fourth Industrial Revolution age? The education of the new era must transform itself to be able to provide students with the scientific and soft skills needed in the 21st century. Students must actively apply and update their knowledge, must be critical thinkers, problem solvers, curious, imaginative, collaborative, communicators. As Alvin Toffler says in his book Future Shock (1970) ‘The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.’ DrIVE-MATH—Development of Innovative Mathematical Teaching Strategies in European Engineering Degrees’ virtual team was designed to develop a novel and integrated framework to teach math classes in engineering courses, at the university level. Its major goal is to apply novel teaching methodologies to teach math courses to future engineers. DrIVE-MATH emerged from the need to prepare and develop essential competences in engineering students, key to their success in the rapidly changing and dynamic workplace. The teachers involved in the project strongly believe that the implemented active-learning methodologies provide better scientific and soft skills support to the future engineers. In this paper, we present the results of the first year (pilot) implementation of the project DrIVE-MATH at the School of Engineering of the Polytechnic of Porto.