http://ecsel.engr.washington.edu/main.html (World Wide Web Directory, 06/1995)
Mechanics of Materials
Overview
These materials have been developed at the
University of Washington for
teaching sophomore-level mechanics of materials as part of the efforts of
the Engineering Coalition of Schools for Excellence and Leadership
(ECSEL)
sponsored by the National Science Foundation. These materials provide the
supporting infrastructure for a multifaceted approach to teaching
engineering mechanics designed to satisfy the following set of desiderata:
(i) integrate engineering practice into the teaching of engineering
science; (ii) address a wide set of learning styles; (iii) provide
opportunities for practice in group work and learning; (iv) promote
communication and synthesizing skills; (v) engage students in the teaching
and learning process; (vi) maintain traditional achievement levels with
respect to traditional measures; (vii) motivate students to continue their
engineering studies; and (viii) maintain reasonable resource demands.
Consistent with this variety of objectives, the approach is composed of a
variety of ingredients. In addition to the standard lecture/homework
/exam suite, these ingredients include design projects, group work, basic
competency exams, computational environments for simulating and
visualizing phenomena, multimedia instructional tools, hands-on
experiences, and student presentations.
Exploring What's Here
The best mechanism for exploring what all is
here is to simply browse through the various descriptions and depictions of
the contents. To provide a low-overhead
means to get some hands-on exposure to the materials themselves, a sampler
package is available. This sampler requires a Macintosh computer with
HyperCard 2.1 (player or regular), and will occupy about 1.5MB of disk
space when uncompressed. If you would like a copy of the entire
Mechanics of Materials software, refer the
document on downloading.
Non-Mac Users
We are also testing several techniques for providing the Mechanics of Materials
software to PC and Unix users. If you are running on one of these
platforms and interested in viewing an entire lecture, vist the
Mechanics of Materials Test Site.
Notions for the Future
We are very interested in obtaining feedback on how these materials are
or are not useful to students and instructors, and we are certainly open
to suggestions for improvement. Although this material has been in use
for several years, we consider it to be prototypical. We are interested
in exploring the possibilitiy of systematically improving, extending
and/or replacing the present materials (and framework, as necessary) with
contributions from many collaborators. With an appropriate peer review
mechanism, this could provide a means for constructing a very effective
set of teaching and learning tools unlike anything presently available.
If this is something that interests you, please drop me a line at
gmiller@u.washington.edu.
http://ecsel.engr.washington.edu/main.html (World Wide Web Directory, 06/1995)