New Instructional Tools for Undergraduate Mechanics: The Purdue Mechanics Freeform Classroom

Event Date: September 18, 2014
Speaker: Chuck Krousgrill and Jeff Rhoads
Speaker Affiliation: School of Mechanical Engineering, Purdue University
Time: 3:30-4:20pm
Location: ARMS B071
Contact Email: engredu@purdue.edu
Motivated by the need to address the broad spectrum of learning styles embraced by today’s engineering students, a desire to encourage active, peer-to-peer, and self-learning, and the goal of interacting with every pupil despite ever-expanding enrollments, the Purdue Mechanics Freeform Classroom (PMFC) represents a new approach to engineering mechanics education.

This complete, yet evolving, course system combines the most successful elements of the traditional classroom, with new hybrid texts, extensive multimedia features, and web2.0 interactive technologies, rendering physical and virtual learning environments. This approach has been shown to produce favorable educational outcomes, yielding a far-superior educational experience for the students and, in many ways, a more positive experience for the course instructor. With continued development and expansion the developers believe that the Purdue Mechanics Freeform Classroom can be adopted at colleges and universities across the globe, rendering a positive and uniform mechanics education experience for all.

Bio:

Jeffrey Rhoads is an Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering. He earned his BSME, MSME, and PhD  from Michigan State University. His areas of research interest are nonlinear dynamics and vibration, resonant micro/nanosystems, and microscale sensors and actuators.

Charles Krousgrill is a Professor in the School of Mechanical Engineering. He earned his BS at Purdue University and his MS and PhD from Cal Tech. His areas of research interest are dynamics, nonlinear vibration of continuous systems, and stability analysis.