Dynamics course for sections with both civil and mechanical engineers

The purpose of this paper is to present the pedagogical technique for a dynamics course taught to both civil and environmental (CEE) and mechanical (ME) engineering students. In this course, the instructor utilizes a combination of both problem-based-learning and traditional lectures. The students learn the concepts by solving example problems from the book without looking at the solutions and then these concepts are reinforced by solving problems of a broad range of difficulty provided at the back of the chapter from the textbook. The dynamics course is taught once a year to both CEE and ME majors. From the viewpoint of the students, dynamics appears to be only tangentially useful to the civil engineering majors, whereas the immediate use is more readily apparent to the mechanical engineering majors. In addition, the topics that are relevant to mechanical engineers may not necessarily be as relevant to civil and environmental engineers. To address this problem the instructor identified the concepts that are relevant to students from each major, for example, energy methods for CEE students and momentum methods for ME students. The course objectives, learning outcomes and assessment data are presented.