e-infrastructure Roadmap for Open Science in Agriculture

In a typical engineering curriculum Statics is the first course offered by engineering faculty that freshman students in the engineering major take subsequent to fundamental courses involving basic physics and basic Calculus. While freshman design course has been widely adopted in engineering curricula throughout the nation to provide a flavor of real world engineering, spark creativity, incorporate project based active learning and teamwork, and improve student retention; Statics continues to provide significant challenge to engineering students to demonstrate that they have mastered the fundamentals to move on to courses such as Dynamics and Mechanics of Materials that immediately follow in a typical mechanical, aerospace, civil, biomedical, agricultural and general or integrated engineering curricula. University of Maryland Eastern Shore (UMES) offers Bachelor of Science degree in engineering with specialization options in aerospace, computer, electrical, and mechanical areas. All engineering students at UMES are required to take the basic engineering mechanics sequence including Statics, Dynamics, and Mechanics of Material. Statics is offered as a 3 credit lecture course at UMES. Non-uniform preparation levels of students and logistics associated with credit-hour limitation and student contact hours provide enormous challenges to faculty to cover all fundamental concepts and assess student outcomes that demonstrate their readiness to move on to engineering mechanics courses that follow. Recognizing the difficulty students have in Statics, engineering faculty have discussed about introducing an additional laboratory hour in the curriculum to motivate students and provide a physical framework to demonstrate the abstract concepts. While additional contact hours will certainly enhance learning; credit hour limitation of curricula is also a "realistic constraint" around which engineering curricula has to be designed. Integration of realistic computer simulations in and outside engineering classroom enables students to gain hands-on active learning experiences without expensive laboratory set-ups. Moreover, unlike laboratory set-ups that can cover only a limited number of physical systems and are available to the students only for a limited period of time, software tools can simulate an unlimited variety of physical systems that can be manipulated at will without risk of damage or maintenance and are available for student use for extended periods of time. In this paper we outline how online tools and simulation software have been utilized to introduce active and project based learning in Statics course at UMES. The emphasis has been on mastering important fundamental concepts while encouraging cooperative learning and teamwork. Learning curve associated with mastering the software environment provides some challenges, however, motivated students can overcome the initial hurdles by utilizing the faculty office hours more effectively as they transition from a "teacher-centered" passive learning framework to a "learner centered" active learning framework.