Author: J. Michael McCarthy
J. Michael McCarthy is a Professor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering. Prof. McCarthy attended Summer Faculty Working Groups facilitated by The Division of Teaching Excellence and Innovation (DTEI) and worked with Changwei Chen, a DTEI fellow, to prepare for on-line course delivery with an on-campus fabrication laboratory. DTEI Working Groups are made up of 4-5 faculty involved in course planning who meet on a weekly basis to share ideas and get feedback and recommendations from DTEI experts.
Contact: jmmccart@uci.edu
What course are you planning?
ENGRMAE 183 – Kinematic Synthesis of Mechanisms.
Figure 1
Prototype of a mechanical walker.
What are the main instructional goals?
I am updating this class to adopt a project-based approach for Spring of 2021 and a new textbook that I developed, Kinematic Synthesis of Mechanisms: a Project-Based Approach (MDA Press 2019). While visiting Professor Bernard Roth at Stanford, I taught a similar class where I tested the project-based approach, and it helped me to develop this new book. The project-based approach allows instruction to shift reliance away from more theoretical textbooks such as Geometric Design of Linkages (Springer, 2011), which consists of equations from beginning to end.
What steps are you taking to achieve these goals during the COVID-19 pandemic?
My experience with the DTEI Summer Faculty Working Group has given me the confidence to teach a majority of the class on-line in with a combination of synchronous and asynchronous materials. I have prepared a number of videos with the help of an excellent team of undergraduate and graduate students that walk the students through the basic techniques that yield innovative designs and digital prototypes.
Figure 2
Digital prototype of a mechanical walker.
The main challenge I face is constructing physical prototypes (Figure 1) with a class that could be over 60 students. A team of undergraduate and graduate students together with Ben Dolan of the Institute for Design and Manufacturing Innovation, and volunteer consultants Ron Kessler and Brandon Tsuge, have helped define a procedure for the on-line purchase of component parts and manufacture using laser cutters and 3D printing. This procedure results in something the student designers can assemble.
The plan is to divide the class into three person teams and have them design a part by part digital prototype of a mechanical walker (Figure 2), and then generate a parts list for purchase and drawings for manufacture. I will obtain the purchased parts and Ben Dolan will make the manufactured parts. Then I will schedule ET302 for use by each team one at a time for assembly of their walking machines. This will limit the density of people in the space and work within the campus guidelines for return to campus.
What’s one thing you would want other instructors to know based on your experience?
My main message is that is takes hours of preparation to provide students with the opportunity to learn new material and to be creative with its application in a combined on-line and project-based learning format.
I have developed hours of video demonstrations as well as an ever changing set of notes. And I have spent much of the summer working with my volunteers to identify parts and fabrication methods to make it easy to remotely design and manufacture the walker components, so the project teams meet only to assemble their mechanical walker I am very grateful to colleagues in the DTEI Summer Faculty Working Groups, my DTEI fellow, and my team of undergraduate, graduate students and volunteers, who have helped me every step of the way. I plan to practice further on a small group of graduate students in Fall 2021, so that I can successfully and safely guide undergraduate students in Spring 2021 in the design and fabrication of a set of unique walking machines, following campus requirements during this pandemic.