Unified Lecture Software For Statics, Dynamics, And Mechanics Of Deformable Bodies

The history and current budget-driven challenges of teaching the basic engineering mechanics sequence are reviewed. In particular, necessary changes in lecture delivery caused by the reluctant decision to change from small to large sections are described. Newly developed lecture software for statics, dynamics, and mechanics of deformable bodies, designed to be used both in class by the instructor and online by the student, is presented. Background The College of Engineering at Virginia Tech consists of eleven departments with the total number of incoming freshmen engineering students being about 1000. For many decades, the Department of Engineering Science and Mechanics has been responsible for teaching three undergraduate mechanics service courses (statics, dynamics, and mechanics of deformable bodies) to the students in most of these departments. Ten years ago, the philosophy for teaching these courses was to keep the number of students in a section to between 30 and 50 and to have only full-time faculty teach these sections. With enough faculty, which the department was fortunate enough to have at the time, it was possible to teach the service courses in this format, teach departmental courses for the undergraduate mechanics majors, and provide a robust offering of graduate courses, all while maintaining a very reputable funded research program in a number of fields. Unfortunately, as has been the case in many other parts of the United States over the past ten years or so, funding levels for education in the Commonwealth of Virginia have been reduced considerably. This trend has accelerated over the last several years. As part of the reduced funding, faculty have been offered inducement packages to retire early, the number of positions for graduate teaching assistants, who are normally used to grade homework, have been reduced, and new faculty hiring has been curtailed. In addition, legislators have required that tuition increases be kept to a minimum. The number of students allowed to enroll in the College of Engineering has not been reduced proportionately. Two or three years ago, an examination of the teaching schedule in the department in any particular semester would reveal that about one“Proceedings of the 2005 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference & Exposition Copyright © 2005, American Society for Engineering Education” P ge 10374.1 third of the departmental teaching effort was devoted to the undergraduate service courses. This was often to the detriment of being able to offer a full range of graduate courses in order to maintain a strong graduate program and the associated funded research activities. It was very clear that adjustments to the long-standing philosophies regarding the service courses had to be made if the department were to continue a full spectrum of activities. To adjust to the new economic conditions, it was reluctantly decided, after decades of resisting this change, to teach the service courses in the available large classrooms on campus and thereby dramatically reduce the number of sections offered in a given semester. There are numerous administrative and other challenges associated with this decision to go to large sections. In this paper, we concentrate on only one, and that is the lecture delivery itself. In very large classrooms (capacity of 200-300), writing on the board is not always practical, because the students in the rear, especially in the rear corners of the room, have difficulty seeing even very large writing. Large writing means that not much material can be put on the board at one time. As an alternative, the instructor can use one or two overhead projectors in such rooms, but drawing accurate figures of sufficiently large size on such projectors can be difficult in real time. The overhead material could be prepared in advance, but then we would have multiple instructors individually spending time solving the same problem, whereas one universal presentation would be more time efficient and could adhere to higher presentation standards. Description of the Software To address the above difficulties encountered in large lecture halls, the authors have begun the development of departmental lecture software for the mechanics service courses. The software can be shown in any classroom with a computer-driven projector (typical is one large screen per room), and it can be placed on the internet for student review. A typical module consists of a concise review of the theory and one or more example problems – the latter worked out in ways impossible with chalk or overheads. Permission has been obtained from the publisher of leading statics, dynamics, and mechanics of materials textbooks to use the high-quality illustrations therein, so that the students can generally see the same style of illustration as used in their textbooks. The chosen software platform is Macromedia’s Flash. The history of the present software dates back to the early 1980’s when student-owned personal computers first became a factor in engineering mechanics education. This effort represents the third generation of mechanics software for the ESM Department. The first in the 1980's was DOS-based while the second iteration in the 1990's was based on the Authorware platform. Beginning with the second generation, professional input on design and navigation strategies has been received. The current development is based in good part on careful and continuous contact with colleagues who are using the software in their classes and on feedback from students. The desired properties of the software include readability in all sizes of classrooms, ease of navigation, ability of the instructor to control the pace of unveiling, absence of long wordy passages, and the use of animation when that feature would be useful. Anything that looks like a button is a button. Red material indicates that a popup expanded explanation is available, while yellow is used for situations in which further information is available, usually in blank areas of “Proceedings of the 2005 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference & Exposition Copyright © 2005, American Society for Engineering Education” P ge 10374.2 the screen. For example, the governing equation ΣFx = 0 might appear in yellow, indicating that clicking will show the application of that governing equation to the FBD at hand.