New Perspectives in Science Education

Observing the student data success in math courses of Technical University of Rijeka, through a series of academic years, it can be concluded that students achieve the best results right on topics in the field of their profession. The reason of this lies in their motivation, but also in a good preparation of their lecturers who try to bring mathematical topic closer to their students through a series of practical problems from the domain of their interest. Although the students have reached a sufficient level of mathematical literacy at college, that they can be offered a wider and more complex content, the fact is that math professors must constantly develop, improve and refine their mathematical knowledge with topics that will match with the interests of students that they are teaching. Only by doing this, they will achieve the best results and the highest pass rate, and thus the satisfaction of students. A good example of such mathematical domain are exactly Laplace transforms which are very useful mathematical tool for solving ordinary differential equations. At the same time, Laplace transforms represent an exceptional tool for modeling and solving various problems in the field of electrical circuits for the students of electrical engineering, Ordinary differential equations, systems of ordinary differential equations or differential-integral equations are simply translated (transformed) by their use, into ordinary algebraic equations or systems of algebraic equations, which are considerably easier to manipulate. Moreover, some more complex problems can be resolved by Laplace transforms which cannot be solved with ordinary differential equations.

Laplace transforms will be presented in this work on certain examples, with an interesting use on electric circuits in the way that it is done at our institution.

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