Engaging Students with "What if?" Scenarios Using MDSolids and Visual Mechanics

Manoochehr Zoghi
Associate Professor
Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Engineering Mechanics
University of Dayton
Dayton, Ohio
mzoghi@engr.udayton.edu

I try to use learning technology whenever I can in my courses--before I began using it, we were spending way too much time on tedious calculations. We could not do as many case studies as we wanted. Moreover, we didn't have a pictorial view of the concepts. Learning technology can help solve these problems, but it has to be the right software. I was

MDSolids® Visual Mechanics College of Engineering University of Dayton

teaching a Strength of Materials class and the textbook I was using provided a software package that was not user friendly: it wasn't very interactive, it didn't address all the parameters in a problem, and the program often halted because it had errors in it. Using it was a very bad experience. So I looked around and a colleague of mine recommended MDSolids®.... my feeling is that students learn a lot if they look at "what if?" scenarios.... once they get the concept, then they can look at the different configurations, different loading applications, different geometry, and develop an intuition for what's going onÉ.when I see the students get excited about something, when they see the benefits, when they sit down and interact with the software, then I think it is not a waste of time....

If you have any questions about our project, you can contact me at: mzoghi@engr.udayton.edu