Helping Students to Feel Mechanics.

This paper assesses the use of physical models as teaching tools in mechanics. These tools were used to introduce engineering theory as part of first and second year civil engineering mechanics courses. The model kits were designed to cover: arches, Gothic cathedrals, suspension bridges, tanks and culverts, dams and retaining walls, point equilibrium, rigid body equilibrium, and beam statics. They were designed in a way to allow the students to feel forces and experience them targeting a deeper learning rather than surface comprehension of mechanics concepts. The beam activity is discussed here, as an example of how the activities work. Students were given the opportunity to work with simply supported beams. The kits were comprised of two pin supports, a wooden beam, two scales, three wooden blocks intended to represent uniformly distributed loads, and a custom made torque tool. The goal of the activity was to provide the students with a sense of how forces act in a mechanically stable structure before being introduced to the mathematical rigor. From the activity, the students are expected to develop an intuition for how reactions are produced, the effect of uniformly distributed loads and their equivalent point loads, and the concept of moments (how they are produced, direct application and its independence of position). The activities were designed to challenge the students' intuition, target misconceptions and engage them more in critical thinking. To assess the value gained by utilizing these models, the students were presented with questionnaires prior to participation in the activities. The questions are designed to gauge the students' understanding of core concepts with respect to their intuition, rather than mathematical rigor. An example of such a question from the Gothic Cathedral activity is: "Give an example of how assembly sequencing is important in building construction". The same questions were also presented to the students after participation in the activities to assess their gained knowledge. This paper demonstrates the validity of inductive learning. In contrast to standard education, where students are presented with the theory first, the students are encouraged to make the connections between core concepts on their own via experimentation. Following this, the students are presented with the theory, with the expectation that they are able to understand the principles intuitively as they are presented with the relevant equations. Although all the students experienced the hands-on mechanics activities in their first year, the theory was not explained until subsequent courses. The theory explained to the students builds from the intuition developed from these activities, reinforcing what they have learned. The goal of inductive learning is to guide the students away from memorization, where they are limited to only solving problems they have already seen, and shift towards a critical thinking framework, where they can abstract what they have learned to more complex problems. Students expressed appreciation of these models. Some of the comments were: "It was nice to feel where the tension was". "I learned how to apply it to real life rather than memorizing it for an exam". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]