BEST (Basic Engineering Software for Teaching) Dynamics, the work of faculty and students of the Basic Engineering department of the University of Missouri--Rolla, began in 1992. The work has been favorably received by our students and by engineering educators. Because of the project's success, UM-Rolla has continued to support the work, and recently, the BEST project was awarded funding by the University of Missouri's Institute for Instructional Development (IID). The project's goals are fourfold: (1) To promote visualization of dynamics problems; (2) To promote students' problem-solving skills; (3) To cultivate in students 'expert knowledge,' that is, an appreciation for and a reliance upon the foundational, unifying concepts of engineering dynamics, and to be able to apply these with confidence to virtually any problem; (4) To create a revolutionary teaching/learning product that, instead of being a classroom supplement, will be a catalyst for change, shifting classes from a teachercentered lecture format to a student- and team-centered discovery format. The most distinctive feature of the proposed work is its scope. Not just an add-on to an existing class reinforcing only a topic or two, this project will produce a CD containing essentially an entire engineering dynamics course. It will contain essential theory, including short video segments on key topics; sixty interesting, creative problems with variable input parameters; step-by-step problem solution procedures with the exact equations and numbers from specific student-created cases; guided tours of interesting cases; and assessment quizzes on both theory and problem- solving, all with an easy to use, intuitive interface. Because dynamics is a difficult-to-learn class taken by nearly all engineering students, the impact of this project is expected to be widespread.
