2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Engaging Mechanics of Materials and Dynamics Students in Designing Curriculum for Statics
Background:
Statics is a common sophomore level course that for many students is their first engineering applied physics course. This introduction to engineering mechanics serves as a prerequisite for mechanics of materials and dynamics. Students often struggle in statics as they are exposed to the content for the first time, but typically develop better statics problem solving skills in the subsequent courses of mechanics of materials and dynamics.
Purpose:
The purpose of this study was to access the insights that students in mechanics of materials and dynamics have when reflecting back on their statics curricula with the goal of leveraging those insights as an opportunity for students to develop learning activities or aids that they would have wanted in their statics course.
Methods:
Thirteen students enrolled in a summer term of mechanics of materials or dynamics were tasked with developing a learning activity or aid for a statics topic that they initially struggled with, but self-perceived that they had gained a better understanding of. These students were interviewed multiple times throughout the summer term to gain insight into their perspectives, thought processes, and decision making during their curriculum design process. Participating in the interviews and providing their learning activity or aid contributed towards 10% of their final mechanics of materials or dynamics grade. The interviews were recorded, transcribed, and thematically coded for data analysis.
Results:
All thirteen students expressed a gained appreciation for the challenges of designing curriculum with common sentiments towards how to design something that is beneficial to multiple different learning styles and developing empathy for their instructors and their curricular decisions. As one student said in their final interview, “…it does take a lot of time to translate the information so that it’s understandable for every person. I appreciate a lot of what the teachers do to make it simple enough for every student to grasp the concept.” Two of the thirteen learning activities/aids created by the students were selected by the statics instructor to incorporate into their future statics courses.
Conclusions:
Students often have little influence on the curriculum used in the classroom, but as recipients of that curriculum, they have valuable opinions that are often only captured in course evaluations. Engaging students to develop curriculum that they think would have been helpful to their learning provides them with an opportunity to enrich their own understanding of the material, potentially create something that can be used to help future students, and develop a greater appreciation for the challenges faculty encounter when designing curriculum. Similar projects can be incorporated in other post-requisite courses to gain these benefits in other disciplines. Future work on this research will aim to develop a framework and rubrics for the project that can be easily adopted in any post-requisite course for those interested in doing something similar.