2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

An open-source online statics textbook was developed to support students in an engineering statics course. Through the course, students were asked to develop and solve their own problems using real-world examples for one of the concepts in that assignment. The motivation for this request was to help students see statics concepts applied in their every-day lives, to express their creativity, to have them review the technical content of that week at a higher level, and to engage with one topic more deeply. Additionally, students were given to option to publish their examples in the online textbook, and 58% of the class submitted 59 real-world examples. A previous study found that 93% of the students thought the activity should be completed in future years, and that students were motivated to publish examples in order to support students in future years and learn the material. Four student assistants were hired to help create the textbook and digitize examples. This paper documents their experience and describes lessons learned for the development of open-source online materials.