On teaching calculus for prospective engineers and computer scientists: A case study monitoring of six semester calculus at Frankfurt UAS

It is a common held perception that nowadays young engineers and computer scientists suffer from a lack of mathematical knowledge, especially capabilities to cope with practical tasks. This becomes quiet obvious when they are confronted with the assignment to interact with each other while presenting their achievements. Nowadays, the math teacher faces complex issues like regarding the heterogeneity of the students' groups, the society's views towards mathematics, the overall workload, expectance, constant attendance or work behavior. In our Computer Science Study Program, the Calculus module was inserted starting with the winter term 2012/2013, additional to Algebra module for the first semester. The main reason was the missing knowledge in math basics towards the concepts needed for teaching other modules like Algorithms Analysis, Statistics, Optimization Techniques. Calculus was provided six times in our Computer Science Program and the results were increasingly better, since the content, methods and framework became a standard. Especially the students' evaluation in the first runs provided useful insights how to improve the teaching attempt. We present in this paper methods and tools, as well as contents and statistics to the topic, by visualizing the methods, tools and activities implemented in this large class approach.