Author: Chai Kwee Siew, Deputy Director, Teaching and Learning Centre

You may wish to consider some of the following approaches when planning your next engineering lesson.

You are invited to share your own favourite resources. Please use the comment box below.

Wiki-based engineering learning

The Design Decisions Wiki (DDWiki) was established by the Design Decisions Laboratory at Carnegie Mellon University as a…

“…central resource for sharing information about design and tools to analyze and support decision-making”.

Weed whacker
[Image Source]

The wiki enables students to share what they have discovered and to reflect on what they are learning. It allows instructors to monitor students’ work and to provide feedback or early intervention if needed. It also allows the instructor to assess contributions of individual team members.

Example page: Weed whacker analysis, where students re-design a lawn trimmer and make conclusions about costs and power supply.

Categories: Go here for a list of all the projects organised in categories.

Hands-on Mechanics

Hands-on Mechanics contains descriptions of many 3-Dimensional, hands-on teaching aids and how they can be used by instructors in their lessons.

A parabolic mirror is a useful teaching resource [Source]

Disciplines: Mechanical, Materials and Civil Engineering

Examples: Paper Stress Concentrations, Creepy Plastic, Tower of Torque, Bending a Knife Blade like a Paper Clip, A Day at the Races – Moment of Inertia.

The following paper talks about the use of such physical models by faculty at West Point:

An Online Database and User Community for Physical Models in the Engineering Classroom by Ronald W. Welch & J. Ledlie Klosky, Journal of Advances in Engineering Education, 2007, 25 pg, pdf

NSF and the Birth of the Internet

NSF and the Birth of the Internet is an informative multimedia offering produced by the National Science Foundation about the birth of the Internet. Unlike other resources which are mostly passive, this site is interactive and comprehensive in terms of describing how the Internet and its related technologies have evolved since the 1960s.

Disciplines: Electronics & Computer Engineering, Network Systems & Security, Electrical Engineering