Universities are encouraging the implementation of innovative methodologies and teaching strategies to develop an interactive and appealing educational environment where students are the focus of the learning process. In such a personalised learning environment, an increase of the students’ engagement and the improvement of the outcomes arise. MathE has been developed to help achieve this goal. Based on collaborative procedures, internet resources – both pre-existing and freely available as well as resources specifically conceived by the project team – and communities of practices, MathE intends to be a tool to nurture and stimulate the learning of Mathematics in higher education. This study introduces and describes the MathE platform, which is divided into three sections: Student’s Assessment, Library and Community of Practice. An in-depth description of the Student’s Assessment section is presented and an analysis of the results obtained from students, when using this feature of the platform, is also provided. After this, and based on the answers to an online survey, the impact of the MathE platform among students and teachers of eight countries is shown. Although the number of collected results is still scarce, it allows the recognition of a trend regarding the use of the material of the Student’s Assessment section for autonomous study. The results indicate the platform is well organized, with a satisfactory amount and diversity of questions and good interconnection between the various parts. Nevertheless, both teachers and students indicate that more questions should be introduced. The overall opinion about the MathE platform is very favourable.

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Every year forest fires destroy millions of hectares of land worldwide. Detecting forest fire ignition in the early stages is fundamental to avoid forest fires catastrophes. In this approach, Wireless Sensor Network is explored to develop a monitoring system to send alert to authorities when a fire ignition is detected. The study of sensors allocation is essential in this type of monitoring system since its performance is directly related to the position of the sensors, which also defines the coverage region. In this paper, a mathematical model is proposed to solve the sensor allocation problem. This model considers the sensor coverage limitation, the distance, and the forest density interference in the sensor reach. A Genetic Algorithm is implemented to solve the optimisation model and minimise the forest fire hazard. The results obtained are promising since the algorithm could allocate the sensor avoiding overlaps and minimising the total fire hazard value for both regions considered.

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University lecturers have been encouraged to adopt innovative methodologies and teaching tools in order to implement an interactive and appealing educational environment. The MathE platform was created with the main goal of providing students and teachers with a new perspective on mathematical teaching and learning in a dynamic and appealing way, relying on digital interactive technologies that enable customized study. The MathE platform has been online since 2019, having since been used by many students and professors around the world. However, the necessity for some improvements on the platform has been identified, in order to make it more interactive and able to meet the needs of students in a customized way. Based on previous studies, it is known that one of the urgent needs is the reorganization of the available resources into more than two levels (basic and advanced), as it currently is. Thus, this paper investigates, through the application of two clustering methodologies, the optimal number of levels of difficulty to reorganize the resources in the MathE platform. Hierarchical Clustering and three Bio-inspired Automatic Clustering Algorithms were applied to the database, which is composed of questions answered by the students on the platform. The results of both methodologies point out six as the optimal number of levels of difficulty to group the resources offered by the platform.

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