Teaching mechanics
For the second year, I am teaching mechanics at the Polytech Annecy enginnering school.
The first year, I did not adjust the material as I was starting.
Thus, it could have been quite boring for students, as I was more reading the tutorials that bring it to life.
This year, I am introducing slides with timers, to keep attention and bring a rythm to tutorials.
I also used polls to enhance interactivity.
Slides with video are great for dynamics, where mechanical parts are moving, particularly in three dimensions. Many students do not get motion from two dimensionnal paper based materials. This is a key part of their learning in mechanics, understanding blueprints.
I am trying to introduce Python SymPy for symbolic, vector calculus. This is particularly simple to use to solve dynamical problems.
The course material is in my MECA654 repository.
We will see if students use SymPy to solve their homeworks. If I had known SymPy in enginnering school, I would.
