Real and virtual workshops in mathematics [engineering education]

It is well known that many engineering students, mainly freshmen have a lack of teamwork and effective communication skills. It is also apparent that the amazing development of multimedia computer software and communication technologies have made more evident those weaknesses and, at the same time, have shown that many freshman students need to be trained, in order to use more efficiently the computational technology. In order to overcome these weaknesses, the authors have designed a long-term program in mathematics organized in stages and oriented to freshman engineering and architecture students. In the first stage, they ran two workshops incorporated to the regular first year maths course of engineering and architecture and developed in the classroom. In both workshops, they used cooperative learning techniques and divergent thinking methods. They also have developed a new assessment scheme to evaluate the students' performance. In the second stage they have offered a special course in mathematics for freshman architecture students that combines a traditional lecture format with "hands on" student's activities, i.e., by using multimedia resources and Internet tools as instructional media.