"A New Approach Where Students Question, Test and Verify the Solution to Their Problem"

This paper assumes the importance of educating our engineering students to question, test and verify “answers” to all of their problem solutions. It presents an approach currently practiced by the authors in teaching an introductory mechanics of materials course. In problem solving, emphasis is placed on: (1) writing the governing equations in symbolic form with a bare minimum of algebraic manipulation, (2) solving the equations with a commercially available, student choice, computer equation solver and (3) most importantly, developing and implementing test case scenarios to verify the validity of the problem solution. There are three major advantages to this approach. First, the development of the equations in symbolic form requires the students to focus more on the physics of the problem. Second, the use of the computer equation solvers eliminates tedious and often error prone algebraic manipulation. Third, the test case scenarios suggested for verification of the “answer” force the student to consider limiting, “known result”, solutions of the problem. Throughout the course, the students apply this approach to homework and project activities. Initially they are given the test scenarios, but, with practice, they learn to create their own. This paper presents two example problems to demonstrate the approach.