The role of mathematics in several scientific disciplines is undisputed; work and everyday life take great advantage of its application. Nevertheless, students often tend to not particularly like it and to consider it of little interest. It is also believed that only people with a certain attitude are capable of mastering the subject. In consideration of this, we aimed to help science students develop mathematical competences by designing a course specifically oriented to applications and problem solving. We administered our course to students attending the first year of a program in biotechnology, asking them to work with technologies instilling curiosity and interest, thus achieving a better proficiency as a consequence. Two questionnaires, along with access and proficiency data, allowed us to collect information about students’ attitudes, beliefs, and activity, which we analyzed by means of descriptive statistics. The promotion of the interaction among learners made them active users of the contents, thus allowing for the adaptation of their learning paths according to their personal necessities, as well as the development of teamwork skills and flexibility. Finally, students recognized the usefulness of the problem-solving approach and the role played by software.

The aim of this paper is to investigate, in a bounded domain of R³ ${\mathbb{R}}^3$ <!--mathContainer--> <!--Loading Mathjax--> , two blending sums of univariate and bivariate C¹ $C^1$ <!--mathContainer--> <!--Loading Mathjax--> quadratic spline quasi-interpolants. The main problem consists in constructing the coefficient functionals associated with boundary generators, i.e. generators with supports not entirely inside the domain. In their definition, these functionals involve data points lying inside or on the boundary of the domain. Moreover, the weights of these functionals must be chosen so that the quasi-interpolants have the best approximation order and a reasonable infinite norm. We give their explicit constructions, infinite norms and error estimates. In order to illustrate the approximation properties of the proposed quasi-interpolants, some numerical examples are presented and compared with those obtained by some other trivariate quasi-interpolants given recently in the literature.