Bridging the gap between first-year students and Engineering: A novel application of mobile technologies for improving Mathematics and Physics learning

Mobile technologies and new methodologies may, when properly combined in a classroom environment, improve the teaching and learning process. This is particularly evident in a first-year Engineering course where, as it is very well known, an important percentage of students have significant difficulties to understand basic mathematics and physics concepts. The “Bring Your Own Device” (BYOD) concept has been gaining attraction and interest in recent years and, when combined with methodologies such as “Flipped Learning,” may completely change the educational environment and improve students' learning. This paper will describe the first steps of a research work that is being developed at the Universidad Tecnológica Nacional (UTN) in Argentina, implementing the new platform qdex (http://qdexapps.com) developed by the Canadian company Quanser (www.quanser.com). This technology allows educational institutions to develop applications (apps) to implement ideas, such as those described in the previous lines of this abstract.