MAJOR-ORIENTED TEACHING OF FUNDAMENTAL MECHANICS COURSES

The teaching load of lecturers in Dept. of Mechanics of most Chinese universities is usually very heavy due to the arrangement that they have to teach fundamental mechanics courses for all other engineering majors. In view of the new requirements of reduced teaching hours with the contents and the level of knowledge unchanged, cramming teaching to large classes (often over 100 students) seems to be the only choice for most fundamental mechanics course lecturers. In addition, the lecturers may not necessarily understand well the engineering fields of the students of other majors, as their own major is normally mechanics and the communication with teachers at other engineering departments may not be easy, so that they normally teach same things to students of different engineering majors, lack of coherent and integration, lack of long-term retention, without appropriate concepts and ability of applications of fundamental mechanics to their engineering problems. Based on ten years of first-hand teaching experience and discussions with teachers and students from civil and mechanical engineering, the author has adopted a major-oriented teaching of fundamental mechanics courses and presented here in this paper the method and its application.