MATHEMATICS FOR THE EDUCATION OF THE ENGINEERS IN THE 21ST CENTURY?

As other professions, automotive engineering has significantly evolved in the past couple of decades and is constantly changing to meet the society needs of the 21st Century. As an example, what is today "an ordinary car"? In general, a common person using a car for his/her own needs doesn't think at its complexity at the amount of "work" embedded. The car is simply used. By "work" we mean all the activities involved for producing the car: multi- inter- cross disciplinary works, thus, a very complex activity. Moreover, nowadays, the rhythm of technical changes happening in the industry appears to exceed the possibilities of many educational institutions to cope with. In this context, we can say the whole educational system is challenged to produce graduate engineers "fit for purpose" as any educational institution has to take the necessary actions to close the existing gap between the industry needs for multi-skilled engineers and the current supply of graduate engineers. As thus, the paper will deal with the design of the automotive engineering curriculum in relation to: - what kind of mathematics should be taught to automotive students? - how can mathematics should be taught prior to higher education so that to be more efficient in the university? - how can be achieved an optimal integration of the math contents with those of the thermodynamics, gas dynamics, vehicle dynamics, etc? - how can teaching and learning of mathematical contents can be linked to the students' engineering tasks for their achievements? Hence the rhetorical question of our study. (C) 2019 Published by Future Academy www.FutureAcademy.org.UK