Dynamics of design and development of web-based mechanics

Statics and Dynamics are core-engineering courses taken by most of the undergraduate students in the College of Engineering and Technology. Since Statics and Dynamics are one of the first two fundamental engineering courses in the curriculum, students often have difficulty with rigorous problem solving and with assessing whether or not their calculated results are physically meaningful. Statics and Dynamics are taught in separate quarters, and Statics is a pre-requisite to Dynamics. Though the two courses are related, students tend to forget what they learnt in the first course when they take the second course. It is very difficult for the instructor to demonstrate the connection between the two courses, and in most cases the instructors for the two courses are different, and the style, terminology and notation becomes different, which can be confusing to the student. By designing the two Courses for the web as one course, the instructors plan to teach two quarters of Mechanics, with Statics and Dynamics being special cases of Mechanics. The web makes it easier to demonstrate the link between the concepts in the two courses as long as they are designed as an integrated Mechanics course instead of two individual courses.