Mechanics of Solids - Mobile Learning

Engineering doesn’t come easily to everyone. Many concepts in Mechanics of Solids such as Mohr’s circle and moment of inertia among others have been confusing to students. In order for students to grasp these important concepts, instructors, in traditional way of teaching, had to spend a great amount of time to explain these concepts and practice through exercises repeatedly which took away valuable time to introduce other necessary concepts/components. Besides, it is observed that students often miss the global picture and connections between various concepts due to the large amount of topics in the course. In an attempt to resolve these problems, highly interactive and concept-rich mobile knowledge apps and synergistic “in-person” controllable remote laboratory will be used to engage students and stimulate active learning. In addition, a common concept map idea which combined the principles of mind maps, concept maps and heuristics will be adopted as a main flow to design and connect different mobile knowledge apps and the illustrated concepts to help students relate various concepts. Furthermore, a mobile remote shake table (earthquake simulator) laboratory which allows the students to remotely participate and conduct hands-on experiments through smart portable devices such as smartphones and tablets will be developed to help students relate theories to real-life engineering problems and increase the students’ persistence by engaging students and stimulating active learning.