2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

This WIP research aims to craft and evaluate an in-class activity that builds undergraduate students’ intuitions for the motions of four-bar linkages. This intuition-building is achieved through a Guided Discovery (GD), an active learning strategy in which students are given an activity that leads them to experimentally discover a given concept themselves, rather than being explicitly taught the concept. In-class GDs assume students have no prior knowledge in order to build intuition. The present paper details the design of the mechanism-based GD module focused on four-bar linkages that is currently under development. The linkage GD is designed to introduce Grashof’s Law, a kinematic principle that states that in order for a link to make a full 360-degree rotation, the sum of the shortest and longest links must be less than the sum of the other two links. The studied GD includes five distinct mini-experiments. The first four mini-experiments use hardware to guide students through four common four-bar linkage architectures. Pairs of students predict joint motions, test their predictions with hardware, compare their observations to their predictions, and generalize their observations to apply to other four-bar linkages. In the fifth mini-experiment, pairs measure the link lengths from the prior mini-experiments to determine Grashof’s Law. This paper presents the design of this GD and observations from a preliminary pilot study that evaluated its effectiveness. As this WIP project continues, we aim to open-source these activities so that future undergraduate students can benefit. (poster session preferred)