Conference Session

Teaching Statics

Collection

2009 Annual Conference & Exposition

Authors

Sue Rosser, Georgia Institute of Technology; Laurence Jacobs, Georgia Institute of Technology; Janet Murray, Georgia Institute of Technology; Wendy Newstetter, Georgia Institute of Technology; Christine Valle, Georgia Institute of Technology

Tagged Divisions

Mechanics

andform local small triangular trusses. So this is a frame problem, with most members forming asimple truss. The forces in those two-force members are solved using the method of joints. Figures 3 a&b – Woman Riding a Bike (Constant Speed)In the future, we plan to develop a truss-only exercise based on the the Minneapolis Bridge (seeFigure 4 below), which will illustrate both the method of joints and the method of sections. Wealso hope to show that this was a so-called simple truss, with no redundancy, so that the failureof one structural element meant the failure of the entire structure. Page 14.779.7

Conference Session

Teaching Mechanics of Materials and General Mechanics Education

Collection

2009 Annual Conference & Exposition

Authors

Bridget Wadzuk, Villanova University; David Dinehart, Villanova University; Edward Glynn, Villanova University; Shawn Gross, Villanova University; Frank Hampton, Villanova University

Tagged Divisions

Mechanics

second semester sophomore year andMechanics III is the first semester junior year. Originally, the authors thought that Mechanics IIand III would be taught in parallel, but it was ultimately determined to be taught serially becauseof external scheduling issues.Another scheduling hurdle that needed to be overcome was that the courses are proposed as acombination of lecture and laboratory, for a total of six hours a week. Additionally, as theCEEVU is a smaller department, we need to be wise with our teaching resources. The proposedcurriculum is planned to be team taught. This is not practical for a make-up class for studentswho are off sequence, as class size is very small in these sections. In our instance, it was decided