Teaching Multibody Dynamics from Modeling to Animation

This paper presents a student project which takes place just after the lecture in classical mechanics for undergraduate students in engineering. The pedagogical objectives of this “learning layer” cover various aspects, namely: give the student the opportunity to exploit and analyze the equations of motion for a real application, make them able to formulate consistent hypotheses for such applications and promote an actual multi-disciplinarity activity (mechanics, numerical methods, computer science and CAD). The project is performed by groups of 6–8 students and is organized in the frame of a global active pedagogical process which characterizes our undergraduate engineering.