Poster 2:

Developing a teaching approach for GA that combine practical and theoretical aspects. Can programming assist in understanding Mathematical based courses

Heba Shoukry, Heriot-Watt University

This work explores the develop a teaching approach for the graduate apprentices that combines practical and theoretical aspects. One of the benefits of graduate apprenticeships, students choose graduate apprenticeship programme because of its integration to the work experience. However, developing this teaching approach for core courses is a challenge because these courses are heavily centred on theory and also due to the apprentice’s diversity in their experiences, skills, educational and professional background and also qualifications. One example of the core courses is mathematics. We want to investigate whether programming can assist in understanding mathematical based courses. This work exploits an analogy to the zone of proximal development. Software programming such as Matlab, Python was introduced in the course design to help the apprentices learn, understand, and visualise the mathematical concepts. Specifically, apprentices were asked to solve a mathematical problem analytically and numerically, reflect the similarities and differences between the two solutions and plot the functions for better understanding and visualisation.