A VIEW on Mechanical Dissection for Freshmen Engineering

Mechanical dissection is an engineering activity that can satisfy a student’s curiosity of how and why the components of a given device can convey specific motions to achieve a desired result. Hence, several university engineering programs have developed mechanical dissection laboratories. However, such laboratories are not always feasible due to the lack of space, personnel, time and high costs. An emerging trend to address this issue is to use multi-media technology to replace/supplement physical laboratories. The objective of this work is to develop the second phase of VIEW (Virtual Interactive Engineering on the Web) which is a virtual mechanical dissection module. Virtual dissection implemented in VIEW requires only the use of existing computer laboratories. This module is used as a supplement in the course: Introduction to Engineering. Further details including assessment results which indicate that the module was well received by students are discussed in the paper.