dc.description.abstract | The lack of motivation and interests for students in
learning Engineering Mechanics and Engineering Mathematics
related courses has become a common and increasingly serious
problem in college Engineering education. The consequences
are the decreasing learning quality of students and increasing
frustration of teachers in these fundamental Engineering
courses. To address this issue, the proposed project is a
three-year integrated project that includes three sub-projects
and gathers researchers in fields of Computer-aided
Instruction, Educational Technology, Educational Psychology,
Engineering Mechanics, Engineering Mathematics, and
Computer-aided Engineering to design and develop an integrated
Engineering Mechanics and Mathematics curriculum for improving
the quality of teaching and learning courses of Engineering
Mechanics and Mathematics. This research work will first review
the current situations and issues in course design and teaching
of Engineering Mechanics and Mathematics, both domestically
and internationally. The learning models of modern students
will also be studied. After the Engineering Mechanics and
Mathematics courses are decomposed into course units and their
relationships and dependencies are analyzed, they are
reorganized into a new curriculum of integrated courses.
Furthermore, software tools and a website for assisting
teaching and learning will be developed as resources for the
curriculum. To investigate the feasibility and effectiveness
of the proposed integrated curriculum, experimental course
teaching will be conducted and evaluated. It is hoped that the
results of this work will significantly help the teaching and
student learning in college Engineering Mechanics and
Mathematics courses.
After introducing the background, objectives, teamwork
structure, methodologies, and expected results of this work,
this report discusses the major results obtained in the past
ten months since the beginning of the work. The major research
results are in the following areas: the survey and analysis on
current teaching and learning issues for college-level
Engineering Mechanics and Engineering Mathematics, analysis on
relationship between Engineering Mechanics core course units
and Engineering Mathematics, design and development of digital
virtual laboratories for Engineering Mechanics experiments,
and design and development of interactive Computer-Aided
Instruction (CAI) software tools and a CAI resource sharing
website. | en |