Teaching Basic Engineering mechanics for optimum student involvement

Copyright and origination

The contents of this book are entirely the work of the author, who retains the copyright in them.

All the illustrations are the work of the author:

Some of the photographs were taken by former students or colleagues, whose names were not recorded at the time.

This work was first published by Gregory Pastoll in 2024

Cover artwork by Gregory Pastoll

Cover design and typeset by Book Covers Australia

bookcoversaustralia.com

ISBN 978-0-6452688-2-9 paperback

ISBN 978-0-6484665-8-1 ebook

Preface

What instructors do in front of a class is far less important than what they get their students to do. I am convinced of this, after more than 30 years of teaching, and observing teaching in a variety of contexts.

For over fourteen years, I taught the subject of basic engineering mechanics, to first- and second-semester students, in a polytechnic/university of technology environment. This was done in two stints: one of five years, and later, one of nine. In between those two periods, I spent another fourteen years as a consultant on teaching methods for the academic teaching staff of the University of Cape Town.

In my capacity as a consultant, I had plenty of opportunity to observe in action and to provide feedback to keen university teachers in a wide range of disciplines.

Back then, the prevailing method of transmitting information to students was by lecturing. Although some of those who consulted me were very good at lecturing, it gradually became clear to me that lecturing was not a method that resulted in active student participation. If people really wanted to improve their teaching, I would advise them to lecture less, and to make use of other activities that would get their students to be more involved, and consequently more motivated.

In promoting this trend, I was inspired by the successes achieved by John Cowan, Emeritus Professor of Learning Development at The Open University, when he taught civil engineering at Heriot-Watt University in Scotland in the seventies.

In my second spell of teaching engineering mechanics, I was able to put into practice a lot of what I had learned as a consultant. I developed a number of ‘learning activities’ that did give my students that kind of experience.

In each successive teaching term I attempted to improve my course. So, what you find in this book is the culmination of a considerable amount of reflective action.

Contents

Preface

Introduction

Chapters

1. Running effective tutorials

2. Exercises in reasoning from first principles

3. Design-and-build projects

4. Using true/false quizzes to stimulate discussion

5. Using previously unseen calculation exercises as the basis for tutorials

6. Supervising experimentation in the mechanics lab

7. Using written assignments to promote learning

8. Predicting the outcome of an operation of a real mechanism

9. Adapting lectures to ensure that students are active, not passive

Conclusion

Appendices

1. Sixteen additional ideas for projects

2. Eleven additional examples of calculation exercises

3. Examples of questions that can be used in lab tests

4. The student feedback survey form developed by the author

5 The author’s other books on basic mechanics and on teaching

6. Selecting the right mix of exercises to use in assessment

7. Entrance testing as opposed to exit testing

About the author

Introduction

The purpose of this book

For anyone in any technical capacity, the importance of having a sound knowledge of basic mechanics cannot be overstated.

Mechanics is the foundational, and probably the most important subject for an aspiring engineer to grasp. It is the science that deals with how solids, liquids and gases interact with forces, the rules that govern the equilibrium and movement of objects, and the ways that energy is transferred.

A course in basic mechanics should ideally:

• Result an a high level of motivation in students, and

• Imbue students with the kind of attitude and a way of thinking that enables them to do engineering.

These qualities arise from participation, intrigue, challenge and accomplishment. This book aims to give instructors practical advice on how to structure learning activities that optimise the chances of such outcomes.

Here will be found descriptions and examples of nine effective types of learning activity that can be used in teaching the subject of basic engineering mechanics.

Some of these types of learning activity are already widely used, although not always optimally. Some are less well-known, but deserve to be used more often. The emphasis here is on tailoring learning activities to ensure student involvement, get them thinking, and be as practical as possible.

What is meant by a ‘learning activity’?

All meaningful learning, irrespective of the subject, is accomplished by doing something, not from just hearing about it, or seeing visuals, or attempting to arrange second-hand information, as when writing an assignment based on references.

You might ‘get the picture’ by having a topic explained, but until you actually do something with your mind and hands, and see the results, you won’t have internalised that knowledge.

This observation is particularly relevant to fields of endeavour that require the development of a specific type of thinking approach, through experience. Like engineering.

What is the difference between a teaching activity and a learning activity?

There is no hard and fast difference, because, obviously, an instructor does something called ‘teaching’ that is supposed to result in ‘learning’. The difference is only discernable by examining the extent to which learning actually occurs, as a result of the activity.

We tend to think of teaching activities as those during which there is a tendency for the instructor to do a lot and the students relatively little. A standard teaching lecture is one such event.

Conversely, a learning activity is one in which the students do a lot, and the instructor relatively little, as far as may be observed during the event. However, what happens before the event is critical: if students are to achieve an appropriate type and level of activity, the instructor needs to have prepared for it very well.

A ‘learning activity’ as described here, is one that sets a focused task for students to tackle. Performing the task ought to result in them getting to understand and be able to apply the principles that they need to learn.

In a well-designed learning activity, students will:

• Learn by doing something practical,

• Take part in discussion and cooperation, directed at solving specific problems,

• Obtain feedback from peers about the way they interpret the subject, and

• Obtain direct feedback about their grasp of the subject from the way their hands-on efforts turn out.

Most of the learning activities described in this book can also be used by instructors to assess how much the students know.

Why isn’t conventional engineering teaching based primarily on practical learning activities?

In the field of academia that is devoted to the study of teaching and learning, a lot of lip-service is paid to the ideal of ‘hands-on’ learning, but that ideal is rarely achieved, even in subjects that are essentially practical in nature. Why?

There are several reasons:

• Some university and college departments rely too much on lecturing as a staple teaching method: they expect instructors to lecture, and they timetable for that. Essentially, if you are a lecturer, you have 250 students expecting something to happen on Monday, first period, so you had better do something with them, and the easiest option (for you) is to lecture.

• Study material is inevitably geared toward the skills valued in answering examination questions. If the assessment process in the institution calls for rote learning and over-abstracted approaches to the subject, the teaching will follow suit. Assessment processes tend to incline in this direction for the convenience of examiners, as a result of some of the other factors described below.

• Many instructors, personally, in the course of doing their jobs as academics, operate on an abstract plane where mathematics, statistics and computation make up most of their sense of reality. Some of them might be out of touch with the practical level of engagement needed in engineering projects. Some of them have always operated on the abstract plane, and find it difficult to imagine why not everyone thinks like they do. Some students, in fact, most, in my experience, need to have hands-on experiences that will enable them to grasp the abstractions used in their discipline.

• Many instructors in universities are obliged, of necessity, to focus most of their attention on research and publishing, so don’t have time or energy to devote to developing new learning activities or exercises. They also don’t relish overseeing the conduction of time-consuming activities from which their students might benefit.

• Even if they had the creativity and energy to redirect their teaching toward making use of hands-on activities, they wouldn’t get recognition or advancement for it. The reason for this is simple: educational institutions cannot reach general agreement on what constitutes ‘good’ teaching.

• Many teaching institutions have become waylaid by the excessive use of information technology in their teaching process. Students spend huge amounts of time interacting with computers, attending to learning management programmes and to so-called ‘interactive learning programmes’ by means of which they experience modelling rather than realities. While institutions might claim that this trend is inevitable, due to large class sizes and events like the Covid 19 pandemic, in a large part the trend is fuelled by the lure of the latest gadgets. As in: ‘Dear instructor, here’s another tool that you didn’t know you needed. It will change your life!’ Yes, but for what gain? It seems that, in the quest to remain at the cutting edge of the discipline, educational leaders overlook the fact that engineers have been trained on the job quite adequately for thousands of years before the advent of computers.

• Classes are often too large for the logistics of practical exercises to be easily arranged. Class sizes get this way because universities have morphed into income-generating bureaucracies. Despite their grandiose mission statements, what really drives them is ‘bums on seats’.

• Many engineering departments face a demand from upper management to produce high levels of ‘throughput’, namely to show that a high percentage of students pass. This places the focus of the ‘teaching’ on passing rather than on learning. In order to pass, a student has only to play the academic game well enough to succeed. As in all games, participants look for the most efficient way of achieving the desired result, which very often means doing just enough to pass. Taking that approach to one’s studies does not result in meaningful learning, or significant retention. However, it is not only students who are affected by the requirement for high throughput. Instructors tend to avoid using exercises or activities that place high demands on students, for the very reason that the results of assessing student performance in such activities will negatively affect the throughput figures.

It is time to get real.

The two categories of learning activity described in this book

1. Traditional ‘teaching’ activities

In engineering schools, the traditional types of activity most often used in teaching basic mechanics are:

• Lectures explaining the theory

• Demonstration of and practice in tackling calculation-type questions,

• Lab experiments,

• Written assignments, and

• Tutorials.

The way these activities are used in practice is not always optimal. In this book I analyse the reasons for this, and show how to improve on the effectiveness of these traditional activities, in order to swing the emphasis from teaching to learning.

2. Activities that put emphasis on student participation

These are activities that can be used in teaching, which definitely involve students to a greater extent, and consequently result in more meaningful learning. They include:

• Reasoning from first principles,

• Carrying out design-and-build projects,

• Getting feedback from true/false tests, and

• Predicting the outcome of an operation of a real mechanism.

This book provides a brief analysis of each of the above types of activity, showing the pros and cons of using each one as a learning opportunity, and, where appropriate, as an assessment tool. With each type of activity that is described, a small number of examples and suitable exercises are provided.

All the exercises used as examples in the present book and in the author’s other books on mechanics (described in Appendix 5) have been devised by the author. Most of them are entirely original, in terms of how questions are phrased and illustrated, and in the choice of practical applications to which the exercises relate.

Some of the exercises are inevitably variations on those that might be encountered in other tertiary courses in basic mechanics. Any similarity between some of these exercises and others that the reader may know about, is simply due to the nature of what needs to