2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

A flipped classroom seeks to increase engagement and center student-teacher interaction by moving the lecture outside of the designated class time and bringing problem solving, or homework, into the classroom. This central reversal is where the flipped classroom model gets its name. Through this central design element, the model seeks to decenter the instructor and instead center the student through student-student and student-instructor interactions.

The flipped classroom model offers several benefits to students including: allowing students to move at their own pace, allowing students to rewatch the lecture if needed, allowing students and instructors to get to know each other better through more interaction, and allowing for higher level learning in the classroom. Additionally, with a focus on problem solving, the engineering mechanics courses provide an excellent context in which to apply the flipped classroom model.

Though the traditional lecture is still more prevalent in the engineering mechanics classroom, an increasing number of mechanics educators are employing the flipped classroom strategy. Though these implementations all share the core design of moving the lecture out of the class and problem solving into the class, there are a multitude of smaller design choices and contextual elements that come into play. Rather than focusing on any one implementation of the flipped classroom model, the authors of this paper seek to gather data, through a survey distributed to the members of the engineering mechanics division, on the contexts in which the flipped classrooms are being implemented, the instructional design choices made by the instructors, the experiences of the instructors in teaching these courses, and the lessons learned over time. By compiling this information, the authors seek to present a number of different strategies to implement a flipped classroom, and provide advice to aspiring flipped classroom instructors on the design choices that may work best for their contexts.