An integrated e-learning approach for teaching statics to undergraduate engineering students

Free body diagrams are a pictorial representation of a body with forces acting on it. Developing the skill to draw and interpret free body diagrams is imperative in an engineering curriculum as it helps students visualize and comprehend the problem. Engineering students tend to have difficulty using free body diagrams due to a lack of spatial understanding, especially when dealing with three-dimensional static problems. Students are often required to draw free body diagram on paper as part of their problem solutions. While this approach is adequate, it still does not allow students to interact with and develop a deeper understanding of free body diagrams. Educational tools developed to build on the understanding of free body diagrams are either limited to a two-dimensional space or does not provide students a comprehensive platform to completely solve a static problem. In this paper, the authors propose a digital platform that allows students to solve both two and three-dimensional free body diagrams for unknown forces. The platform incorporates Merrill’s Principles of Learning and a clear workflow diagram to assist students in better understanding free body diagrams. The proposed solution also presents an improved feedback system to improve the learning experience of students. Furthermore, the proposed solution addresses the needs of instructors by providing them the means to analyze their students’ performance at different stages of the problems.