A Physicist and an Engineer Walk into a Bar....

PRESENTATION ONLY This presentation will cover information in a paper we have submitted to the Physics Teacher journal. It focused on the physics instructor's perspective on teaching mechanics. This presentation will focus more on the engineer's perspective, but will include speakers from both physics and engineering. Mechanics is the study of the ways in which bodies respond to forces and is a critical field of study for most engineers (and most scientists). Although we grow up with examples of mechanics all around us (e.g., an accelerating car, a heavy backpack, a spinning top, a batted baseball, or a kicked soccer ball), most students do not study mechanics until they take a course in physics in their junior or senior year of high school or first year in college. This physics course lays the foundation for the usual engineering mechanics sequence – Statics, Dynamics, and Strength of Materials – that is critical for engineers to design safe mechanical systems. Unfortunately, some subtle differences in the way physicists and engineers teach mechanics may result in confusion for our students. Post-secondary instructors of physics and engineering fully attended at least one course taught by an instructor of the other discipline, examined current textbooks, and looked at curricular mappings. We identified areas that may be a source of difficulty for students in transferring ideas from physics to engineering courses. In addition to well-documented conceptual, reasoning, and quantitative issues that students face when learning mechanics, we identified challenges associated with the disciplinary emphases of the instructors. Differences include units, notation for standard quantities and their associated changes, conventions for free-body diagrams, and coordinate systems to describe curvilinear motion. It has been extremely valuable for engineering instructors to better understand our students' prior knowledge and experiences. We have been able to warn our students about the different nomenclature (e.g., "in your physics class you used U for potential energy, but in dynamics we use V – and by the way, we'll use U for work"). We have also found it useful to refer to the velocity and acceleration (motion) diagrams used in many physics classes to help describe and determine vectors in both normal/tangential and radial/transverse coordinate systems. Sitting in on one another's classes proved to be an enjoyable and eye-opening experience. Not only did the collaboration force us to think about alternative ways to teach mechanics, but also provided us the opportunity to learn some bad jokes in both physics and engineering to add to our repertoire. We highly recommend readers establish such connections at their own institutions.