PI: Siegfried Holzer, Alumni Distinguished Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering

Project Goals or Needs Addressed: "it is fairly well known... statics is a killer course to this day." "...if you take a look at strategies that have proven themselves for effective teaching and learning, well statics violates almost all of them."
Project Grants and Expenditures: $7000 (year 6), $8000 (year 7), $8000 (year 8), graduate assistants



Experiential learning in mechanics with multimedia. (2000). International Journal of Engineering Education, 16(5).
[PDF article]

Multimedia learning environment for statics. Succeed project update, May 2001.
[PDF file]
 


A multimedia program was pilot tested on junior-level architecture students taking a statics course based on experiential learning theory. The program is utilized as part of a course structure that includes workshop-style cooperative learning activities. Students work on a computer as a pair, and are asked to engage in reflective discussions as a team. A typical course session might include these instructional activities: a warm-up problem, 10-15 minute mini-lectures (some of which are presented by the multimedia program itself), and cooperative activities in a "think-pair-share" format.

In the multimedia program, students are encouraged to first inductively think about and develop concepts, then deductively apply the concepts to problems. The program contains "…frequent questions to get students engaged [with] incremental feedback…." The multimedia program is not only utilized in class to present mini-lectures and problems, but also to allow students to "preview and review" lessons. Each student has a copy of the program for their personal computer.

While ideally this product would be used by the 1400+ freshmen engineering students taking statics annually, this engineering course is currently content-heavy and would not integrate active-learning type activities well without agreement or buy-in from faculty to sacrifice some content "coverage" in lieu of more student engagement. Engineering students can access the multimedia program on a CD, but it is not actively integrated into their statics sections.