Premier Courseware of 2000

West Point Bridge Designer and Project Links were announced as the Premier Courseware of 2000 at the 2000 ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference on Friday, October 20, 2000 in Kansas City, Missouri.

West Point Bridge Designer

Stephen J. Ressler, United States Military Academy

West Point Bridge Designer provides undergraduates with a tool for visualizing structural behavior and introduces middle and high school students to the engineering design process. The courseware provides an entertaining educational experience for the novice designer. A student can view a 3-D animated “load test” of their “drawing board” design, this animation allows for the visualization of the tension or compression of the structural members. If a design fails the “load test”, the user watches the animated structure fall into the river below, but is then immediately taken back to the “drawing board” for structural analysis and improvement. For the more experienced designer, the courseware offers realistic design choices between materials and member sizes, and the very real economic tradeoffs each possesses.

Project Links

Mark H. Holmes, Kenneth S. Manning and Robert L. Spilker, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and Dianna L. Newman, University at Albany, SUNY

Five modules of Project Links are recognized: Constrained Optimization by Ashwani Kapila & Bruce Buhler; Drag Forces on Solid Objects by Howard Littman & Bernard Fleishman; Electric Potential by Kongki Min, Michael Malak, Stephen Irving & Colin Fredericks; Mass Transport by Jonathan Newell, Russell Manson, Donald Drew, Jason Hylan & Elisa Barney Smith; and Vibrating Strings by Gregor Kovacic, Robert Degeneff, Steve Braun & Billie Rinaldi.

Project Links provides a comprehensive environment of learning materials that link fundamental mathematics topics to applications in engineering and science. Mathematical topics from calculus, linear algebra, probability, statistics, differential equations, discrete mathematics and advanced mathematics are included in the project. These topics are linked to relevant real-world applications in areas such as mechanical oscillations, electricity and magnetism, transport phenomena, system design and graph theory. The Project Links modules are intended to be used in a studio setting, with student access to the Internet, although the media is comprehensive enough to be used independently by students for self study. The Project Links modules help students visualize problems, improve their problem-solving skills, recall course content and develop confidence in content areas.

2000 Sponsors

About the Premier Award

The Premier Award for Excellence in Engineering Education Courseware was developed by NEEDS—A Digital Library for Engineering Education, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., and the Synthesis Coalition to recognize high-quality, non-commercial courseware designed to enhance engineering education.