Increasing the dynamics in Dynamics

Implementation of the Project

How do we make sure that our students spend quality time during the semester on actively developing a fundamental understanding as well as analytical and computational problem solving skills? In large BSc classes like Dynamics (Mechanics III), our typical format of lecturing to huge student audiences and solving simple pen-and-paper problems in exercise sessions is of limited effectiveness and tends to promote students focusing on studying merely for (and right before) the exam. Such learning is little sustainable. What is missing is «time on task» by the students during the semester. The contents of Dynamics are highly mathematical and involve complex 3D visual thinking – increasingly so during the course of the semester. As a consequence, many students (with diverse educational and personal backgrounds during the early years at university) are left behind, exam pressure is high, and the vicious circle starts over.

To escape from this vicious circle, we developed, created and implemented a variety of new online learning elements for Dynamics, which the students can explore, solve, analyze, and receive feedback for on their own on a weekly basis during the semester. The focus on interactive visualizations and animations promotes intuitive understanding and a continuous, playful, curiosity-driven exploration of the course contents. At the same time, the integration of python code allows for the use of numerical solution strategies, which makes more complex problems accessible. Automatic feedback on submitted learning elements is immediate, though students can work asynchronously on their problems. The wealth of data received from the students‘ responses to the online learning elements (in comparison with the exam outcomes) can be used to assess the effectiveness of the new learning elements and contributes to their continuous improvement. The use of Moodle/STACK for weekly homework plus Jupyterhub for animations enables a simple transition to other classes (in fact, analogous elements have already been deployed in our BSc course «Intro to FEA»). The integration of LevelUp in Moodle admits gamification and inspires student participation. Further linking the Jupyter notebooks to SpeakUp enabled the integration of live clicker questions, so that the Jupyter notebooks serve as the backbone of the weekly exercises, in which the students solve the problems and explore the animations under the guidance of a teaching assistant.

The new learning elements, especially the STACK homework, was extremely positively received by the students. Thanks to a small grade bonus, on average 99% of all students submitted their problems regularly throughout the semester. Providing significantly more problems than points needed for the grade bonus incentivized exploration and critical thinking rather than going into «exam mode» and aiming only at the outcome. Interestingly, most students scored a lot more points than required for the grade bonus: once the extrinsic motivation was removed (after about 2/3 of the semester for many), they were so used to the weekly problems that they voluntarily continued until the end of the semester.

Many students commented on the effectiveness on the course evaluation survey (some student groups started weekly «Dynamics parties»). We also learned from mistakes, e.g., providing a surplus of problems and admitting several attempts to prevent students from cheating and to give them the confidence to answer wrongly.

We finally achieved what we aimed for: students working continuously during the semster to put their knowledge to practice, to deepen their understanding, and to learn sustainably and effectively (which gains importance during/after PAKETH). These elements have been deployed to more than 3000 students over the years.

Motivation, Project Mission, Vision Statement

This project aimed for a constructive alignment of the lectures (4h/week), exercises (2h/week), homework (14 sets, each available for seven days), and the final exam. Although the topics of lectures, exercises, and exam problems in Dynamics are fairly well aligned, the student performance in the exam could be much better – even though the students are overall very satisfied with this class (according to evaluations). The newly introduced weekly problems that connect exercises and homework and their relevance towards the final exam not only increased the alignment, but they also allowed the students to reach higher taxonomy levels. This is supported by the increased «time on task» of the students on a weekly basis. By integrating computational problems into the exercises, the project follows a constructivistic approach, letting students design and test dynamical systems, and cooperative learning (letting students solve problems during the exercises in small groups). Furthermore, regular formative feedback to the students about their learning progress is essential, as well as feedback from the students to the instructor. Finally, the focus on visualization tools follows the concepts of visual teaching to enhance student understanding.

Innovative Elements

We were the first BSc course in D-MAVT to introduce weekly Moodle/STACK homework (a system now adopted by various other lectures) to promote continuous student learning, supported by gamification through LevelUp on Moodle. We further developed a new link between Jupyter Notebooks and SpeakUp to integrate self-studying and team clicker questions in our exercises. We deployed a suite of new animations and visualizations of mechanics principles in the weekly Jupyter notebooks used in the exercises.

The main difference from traditional teaching (especially in typical engineering BSc courses at ETH) is the ability to still cover a dense curriculum of fundamental theoretical concepts while allowing students to playfully explore the topics and independently engage with applications of the theoretical principles on their own, at their own pace, and with immediate feedback. By now this may have become a standard across many courses, but it likely was not when we first introduced it in 2021.

Effects on Student Learning

Student feedback of the new learning elements, especially the weekly online homework sets, was overwhelmingly positive on the LET/UTL evaluations (supported by ca. 99% of the students submitting all 14 weekly problem sets – a lot more than required for the grade bonus). This clearly shows the effect of the new elements to continuous and sustainble student learning and application of knowledge. A correlation of results with exam grades confirmed that those with the most success on homework problems typically also performed very well on the final exam. TA and student feedback has been used to continuously improve the learning elements.

Which Elements of Your Project Would You Recommend to Others?

All elements (Moodle/STACK homework with LevelUp, jupyter notebooks with SpeakUp integration) are easily transferrable to other ETH courses. In fact, we already deployed similar elements in «Introduction to Finite Element Analysis» (ca. 450 BSc students), while other courses in our MAVT BSc curriculum have since introduced similar concepts. Within the IDEE framework, such learning elements may also qualify for generating pools of problem sets across courses.