Project Title | Developing dynamics practice problem resources in MechanicsMap and WeBWorK |
Principal Investigator | Agnes d’Entremont |
Faculty | Applied Science |
Funding Year | 2020 |
Project Summary | For engineering subjects that focus on modeling and problem-solving like dynamics (classical mechanics), completing many practice problems is essential to learning. Typical textbooks have 1000+ practice problems for students to complete, either as part of homework or during self- practice. Open textbooks typically have good theoretical content, but they have few practice problems available because developing high-quality problems is very time-consuming. This is the primary limiting factor in adopting an open textbook for such courses. Dynamics is a core subject in mechanical engineering (plus a few other engineering disciplines), and is a required course for every second-year student (~130 per year). The current required dynamics textbook costs $200 (total of $26k in student cost per year if every student bought a new copy). This project will expand the example problems and practice/homework problems available within both the MechanicsMap open online textbook (http://mechanicsmap.psu.edu) and the WeBWorK open online homework system (integrated with MechanicsMap) to allow the adoption of MechanicsMap as the required course textbook in second-year mechanical engineering dynamics (MECH 221) at UBC. WeBWorK is an open online homework system used globally in mathematics, and used extensively at UBC in math and engineering. It has a shared open problem bank called the Open Problem Library. MechanicsMap is an existing open online textbook covering engineering mechanics (statics and recently dynamics). One hundred and ten (110) example/worked problems with video solutions (as well as PDF solutions) will be created and posted within MechanicsMap (embedded via YouTube). Two hundred and twenty (220) practice problems (110 WeBWorK interactive problems, plus 110 static problems with answers/solutions, similar to traditional textbooks) will also be created and deployed as part of the MechanicsMap open online textbook and WeBWorK practice sets, dramatically expanding existing resources. This development will bring the total available open problems from 150 to 480 (equal to nearly 70% of the total 715 problems available in the current paid dynamics textbook) and will allow the adoption of the MechanicsMap textbook for second-year dynamics in mechanical engineering at UBC. |
Grant type | OER Implementation Grant |
Funded Amount | $24,986 |
Project Poster | OER Mechanics Project |
Resources | This project resulting in the following: -improvements to the MechanicsMap open textbook including 9 new textbook sections in rigid body dynamics and significant expansions of other sections in rigid body dynamics; –2053 WeBWorK problems (including 1009 converted from University of Saskatchewan); –1473 professional mechanics images; –95 new videos (lecture and worked problems) on rigid body dynamics. |