Intradisciplinary teaching in the engineering studies curriculum: Applying numerical modeling techniques to statics problems

Students often view the classes in the Engineering Studies curriculum at Armstrong Atlantic State University as being a set of discrete and disconnected courses. This misunderstanding leads to a struggle to retain and apply course concepts from one class to subsequent classes. This work attempts to address this issue by the development of an intradisciplinary teaching and learning effort across a Statics and Computational Modeling course. The approach employed the use of specific problem examples from the Statics course (ENGR 2001) adapted for use in the Computational Modeling course (ENGR 2010). These are two of the core courses taken by mechanical and civil engineers during their sophomore year. The Statics course presents the principles of statics including equilibrium of rigid bodies, analysis of truss systems, shear and bending moment diagrams, and the calculation of centroids and center of mass. Emphasis is also placed on teaching the students to analyze problems in a systematic and logical manner. The main objective of the Computational Modeling course is to study the fundamentals of numerical methods and to develop computer programs for solving engineering problems using MATLAB. Examples of numerical methods include solving roots of equations, linear algebraic equations, integration and differentiation. Assessment of this effort was accomplished with supplementary course evaluation questions given at the end of the semester. This paper will discuss the results of the student projects and evaluations, and the authors' experiences with this intradisciplinary teaching effort.