Introduction
In recent years, the rapid development of manufacturing industry has accelerated the demand for applied talents in engineering, especially in machinery.
As one of the important bases of talent cultivation, colleges and universities bear an important responsibility for the national strategy of implementing a strong talent country. Therefore, the development of training standards and talent cultivation mode for engineering students, and the enhancement of students’ engineering practice, design ability and innovation ability have become one of the urgent problems in the new era.
Current situation of teaching theoretical mechanics course
Theoretical mechanics is a classical, theoretical and logical mechanics course with mature content system. Over the years, the structural system, theoretical framework and basic knowledge content of theoretical mechanics have remained basically unchanged.
However, with the deepening of the teaching reform, the lecture hours of theoretical mechanics have been gradually reduced from 96 to 64 or 48, and the amount of lecture hours has been greatly compressed, and teaching all the contents of theoretical mechanics (statics, kinematics and dynamics) in a short period of time cannot guarantee students’ complete acceptance and digestion, not to mention the application of these theories to analyze and solve practical problems.
The current lecture method mainly uses a combination of PPT and board books, and teachers and students rely heavily on PPT, which makes each lesson more informative and difficult for students in applied undergraduate institutions to master so much content in a short period of time, and students have more extracurricular activities and less time to devote to review outside of class.
Therefore, students cannot fully understand and digest the content in class, and always leave some knowledge gaps, and over time, the knowledge they fail to master will become more and more, affecting the subsequent knowledge and interest in learning, leading to poor learning results.
At the same time, the development of network technology enables students to acquire knowledge through network, but some students are addicted to online games and have less time to devote to study. This brings challenges for the teaching of theoretical mechanics, and at the same time, it also brings opportunities for teaching reform.
Teaching reform of theoretical mechanics course
(A) Reform of teaching content
The course content of theoretical mechanics is relatively mature, with good logic and hierarchy, and most of the content is closely related to the actual production and life activities.
Some contents of theoretical mechanics are repeated with the contents of general physics, such as the kinematics of points, simple motion of rigid bodies, etc., which are left for students’ self-study in class; for some theorems with more complicated derivation process, such as the velocity synthesis theorem of points, it is not necessary to introduce the mathematical derivation of the velocity synthesis theorem to students in detail, as long as the emphasis is on how to use the theorem to analyze and solve problems.
In addition, we should arrange the quantity and quality of the exercises, choose the topics carefully, try to make the exercises come from life practice, increase the interest and comprehensiveness of the exercises, and improve the students’ learning interest and initiative through the analysis and solution of the exercises. In a word, in the reform of teaching content, we should combine the development of students’ thinking and the changes of the era environment, reasonably allocate the teaching hours according to the target requirements of mechanical applied talents training, delete the complicated and simplify, and focus on highlighting the application of knowledge points in the actual engineering analysis.
(B) Reform of teaching mode
In order to meet the requirements of mechanical? The teaching mode of theoretical mechanics also needs to be updated and developed with the help of modern educational technology and information transmission channels, and develop various teaching methods to transmit knowledge to students efficiently and quickly.
In the teaching reform of this course, the classroom teaching is no longer based on the teacher’s lecture, but on the students’ active learning. The traditional teaching method of PPT + board book is changed to the discussion and research teaching method of teacher’s guidance and students’ group discussion, which changes the current situation of students’ busy listening to lectures in class and homework in class. Each class at Linyi University is 45 minutes long, and the teacher should not spend more than 15 minutes on lecture, leaving 30 minutes for students to discuss and study. Within 15 minutes, teachers demonstrate complex mechanics models or mechanisms with the help of multimedia technology, such as video animation and images, to improve students’ perceptual cognition.
During the seminar, it is important to discuss in groups with students as the center. The teacher needs to prepare in advance and choose some engineering examples as the topics for discussion, and the teacher’s role is to guide and answer questions. After the discussion, before the next class, each group should select one person to present the problems encountered during the discussion of this group, the ideas of problem analysis and results in PPT or WORD.
The teacher should make detailed answers to the common problems arising from the students’ discussion, and record the explanation of relevant knowledge points into a micro-course and send it to the online learning platform or directly to the students, so that they can study in depth through cell phones or the Internet. The focus of the micro-course content is clear and prominent, and the time is short, students will feel particularly relaxed in learning, which can mobilize students’ active learning. In the process of video recording, new contents of recent scientific and technological achievements are introduced so that students can observe the important role played by theoretical mechanics in the actual engineering field.
(C) Reform of assessment methods
The traditional examination method of theoretical mechanics is mostly closed-book examination with more theoretical knowledge, and the content of the examination includes basic concepts, fundamental principles and their applications, and the test questions come from various question banks, and this method cannot fully reflect the usual learning process and effect of students. Some students usually do not participate in the discussion and study, but only rely on the surprise review before the examination, they can pass the examination, but after the examination, they forget all, which is not conducive to the learning of subsequent courses.
Therefore, this kind of purely theoretical examination has great drawbacks. For this reason, in the reform of the assessment method, the final grade of theoretical mechanics course is represented by the academic grade, and the composition of the academic grade is composed of the final exam grade and the usual grade, in which the final exam grade only accounts for 30% of the academic grade, while the usual grade accounts for 70% of the academic grade. The class participation grade is 20% of the grade, the seminar grade is 50% of the grade, and the seminar performance grade is 30% of the grade.
The seminar grade accounts for a larger proportion, which can fully mobilize students’ enthusiasm to participate in the discussion and avoid students’ perfunctory work; the process performance grade encourages students to use more brains and ask innovative questions; the assessment of the usual grade is more flexible, and teachers need to carefully assess and strictly enforce it in the usual discussion process. From the reform of the assessment mode, it can be seen that the academic performance of students is no longer a single theoretical calculation, but pays more attention to the monitoring of the usual learning process, which mobilizes the students’ active thinking and learning enthusiasm.
Conclusion
Theoretical mechanics course plays a role in the curriculum system of mechanical applied talents, and lays the foundation for learning subsequent professional courses. As an engineering college aiming at cultivating applied talents, it needs to actively promote the curriculum teaching reform and cultivate engineering technicians with the ability to solve practical engineering problems.
For this course, students are required to be able to use the principles in theoretical mechanics to solve practical problems. Therefore, in the future teaching process, more attention will be paid to the exercise of students’ engineering practice ability and engineering innovation ability in order to cultivate more applied engineering technology talents with engineering literacy.