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In this contribution, we show the practical use of the computer to visualise simple computational simulations to 'show phenomena that occur in everyday life, or require an abstract understanding for being unintuitive phenomena. The relationship of the mathematics to different scientific disciplines motivates us to devise different treatments to find a solution for understanding and predicting what happens in nature. In this way, other scientific areas call for new mathematics and these in turn provide new discoveries. Today there are several computational tools to develop learning units that enable allow understanding of different concepts. One is the Python language, which contains tools for numerical and symbolic calculations, and also for graphical visualisations with the advantage of being open and easy to learn. Currently, the Jupyter project is an environment in which different languages come together under one programming scheme. In this manuscript, we show how we have adapted IPython Notebook to show some simulations on some phenomena related to geometric problems, numerical calculation and its applications in mechanical and electromagnetic systems. In this way, the authors have designed a web site containing learning units based on examples of mathematical, physical and biological problems.
1INTRODUCTION
It is very common that in the master class, the teacher uses the blackboard as a unique educational resource for discussion of concepts and examples of solutions. In more dynamic courses, some teachers use didactical materials in graphical forms to show the fundamental concepts of the subject and, in some cases, they use experimental or demonstration activities (Perrenoud, 2000). However, it has now been shown that Information and Communications Technology (ICT) not only enriches the course but also constitutes a very useful resource for displaying several concepts, insomuch that students can continue to use later to complement their training. ICT goes from simple presentations to complex interactive units that can be used in many electronic devices accessible to students such as computers, tablets, smartphones, etc. One of the main advantages of these tools is that students and teachers can interact outside of the classroom, as they make use of the resources offered by the Internet such as web pages, blogs, social networks, email, etc. This facilitates learning in context, based on the experiences of students (Roth and Roychoudhury, 1993; Diaz-Barriga,...