Premier Courseware of 2000
On Friday, October 20, 2000, the Premier Courseware of 2000 were announced at the 2000 Frontiers in Education at an awards ceremony sponsored by
John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
West Point Bridge Designer by LTC Stephen J. Ressler, P.E., Ph.D. at the 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 by Project Links
at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Five modules of Project Links are recognized for the 2000 Premier Award: 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.
These instructional courseware packages were chosen through a rigorous application and review process and represent excellence in the use of
computer-based instructional media to enhance engineering education.
The Premier Courseware have distinctive strengths, representing the
breadth of styles, sophistication, pedagogies, and use of multimedia
that should encourage incorporation of courseware in the classroom.
Obtaining Copies of the Premier Courseware of 2000
To obtain a complimentary copy of the Premier Courseware of 2000 on CD,
please click here.
If you'd like more information about the Premier Award or how to become a sponsor, please contact Professor Joe Tront at Virginia Tech via email at jgtront@vt.edu.
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