A Heat Conduction iPhone and iPad App for Engineering Education

Studies have shown that most students learn by doing. This is increasingly becoming true in today’s generation which is full of texting, tweeting, and emails. Students are always on their phones, so why not use them in the classroom? In this paper, we report on the design of a heat conduction app to help students visualize the solution of an unsteady-state heat conduction problem. The mathematical solution to this problem requires some advanced mathematics, and students usually get bogged down in the details of the solution, without understanding the impacts of the mathematical assumptions and/or model parameters on the resulting solution. The app allows students to easily see the temperature profile in the object as a function of time for heating or cooling, and the impact of the system parameters such as the thermal conductivity, heat capacity, density, length, and heat transfer coefficient on the resulting solution.