Curriculum Design of Statics and Dynamics: An Integrated Scaffolding and Hands-on Approach

Statics and Dynamics are necessary fundamental components of the engineering curriculum for Mechanical Engineering (ME), Civil Engineering (CE), and some other engineering disciplines. Students typically take these courses at the beginning of their second (sophomore) year and data suggests that many students drop out of engineering majors around this time. While this may not be directly attributed to Statics and Dynamics, it is widely agreed that these courses are challenging for many students. This paper presents the outline of a recently designed combined course in Statics and Dynamics with many new features that are not observed in the traditional courses in Statics and Dynamics. The need for designing a new combined course has been necessitated by four factors - a need for incorporating hands-on skills that are increasingly demanded by employers, navigating students through a challenging course that is a pre-requisite for other courses, attempting to improve retention of ME and CE students, and balancing the credit hour load of students in a liberal education environment where general education requirements are sizeable. This course has added new learning outcomes to accommodate laboratory experience as well as use of simulation software to enhance student engagement and at the same time provide the students with multiple options that encourage different learning styles. The course has been designed for four credit hours consisting of 180 minutes of lecture time, 120 minutes of laboratory time and 60 minutes of tutoring time every week of the fourteen week semester. The contact time has been distributed so as to promote scaffolding of the learning process. The learning outcomes established for this course include ABET1 outcomes 'a' and 'e' as well as ABET1 outcomes 'b' and 'k'. Although it may be argued that the inclusion of more learning outcomes may overburden the students and require them to allocate more time for this course, the feedback from students for the last two semesters has been generally positive. This paper provides the details of the curriculum and explains the rationale behind the changes in a critical course for ME and CE students. It is expected that the curriculum will lead to a broader discussion on the need to revamp critical courses in the engineering curriculum in order to enhance student engagement, and in an attempt to improve student retention in engineering.