Bridging Course: Why, How, and First Impressions

The knowledge gap between high school and university level mathematics is a persistent issue that hinders students in their academic career. Freshman Civil Engineering students at the University of Twente, Netherlands struggle with passing entry level Calculus courses. In 2022, the programme introduced a workshop to help students put their prerequisite knowledge to the test; still, many students could not pass these courses. Capitalising on the idea behind this workshop, a fully digital course was introduced in 2023. In this research we dive into the design of the contents of this course. Furthermore, we investigate its impact on student performance with respect to previous years using a qualitative approach: interviews with second year students provide, to this avail, a valuable comparison.