Motivating the mathematics studies by real-life examples of signal processing and communications engineering

The mathematics skills of the students majoring in signal processing and communications engineering at our university have degraded at an alarming rate during the recent years. One of the reasons for this is their poor motivation in mathematics studies in their freshman year. We have studied possibilities to improve their motivation by presenting real-life examples from various signal processing application areas with visiting lectures to the freshman mathematics lectures. The results indicate that the students find the visits interesting and help them to focus their studies.