Collection

2011 Northeast Section Meeting

Authors

Matthew R. Stein

objective.Integrating computer use into classical mechanics courses is not new, as many instructors use some form ofcomputer-aided simulation of problems [3] and some further employ problem solving software andinteractive computing [4,5,6,7,8]. Dynamics is a required course for all students in the fourth semester ofour eight-semester general engineering program. This course is offered to the entire sophomore class intwo sections with a population between 15 and 20 students each. Because of the unavailability of a controlgroup, statistical comparisons are of dubious value with this small sample size. Graded performance maybe compared from year-to-year, but in each academic year all students receive the same course delivery.In prior reports [9,10], I described

Collection

2011 Northeast Section Meeting

Authors

Bruce Char

describes a problem in a simulated car controller in which the presentation facilities are usedto create an animated GIF to be viewed in the student’s web browser as part of the problem presentation.Students must write a control program that successfully navigate the car through several variant scenarios.The scenario outcomes are presented as animations similar to what the students should see when they runtheir control programs through the simulator. Creating the animations was so computationally extensivethat it could not be done on-the-fly by the Maple TA server at test generation time. Rather, numerousscenarios were pre-computed and stored on disk, with dynamic variation occurring through random selectionof a scenario.Use the symbolic