Organization
ENGN0040 will be 'flipped' in Spring 2022 to make it easier to keep up with the class if/when we all get sick. Class and assignments will consist of:
- Pre-recorded lecture videos (these replace the in-person 9am Tues/Thurs common meeting>>.
- A weekly small-group tutorial meeting, led by a faculty member. These will be held during the scheduled MWF conference section meeting times.
- Eight problem sets (lowest HW grade is dropped, so one is optional) >>
- Four team design projects >>
- A final exam (optional if you are taking the class S/NC) >>.
For due dates, and a suggested schedule for watching lecture videos, please visit the Calendar page >>
For a detailed syllabus, with links to individual sections of lecture recordings, visit the Syllabus page >>
Help!
Most people find the material in this course challenging. You can find help in several places:
- Common lectures (or lecture videos) present the concepts, illustrating them with examples. The lectures do move quite quickly - there is a lot of material to cover, and not much time to cover it. The videos also contain some advanced material for those interested, which will not be covered in the live lectures, homeworks or exams (these are identified clearly in the recordings); and some review topics.
- Recitation sections will be an opportunity to ask questions about the class material; and work on example problems as a group
- Try the online notes for detailed explanations of the ideas and more examples (not all of the material in the notes will be covered)
- Old exam problems and homework problems provide more worked examples (solutions sets can be found for all of them)
- You can post questions (and find answers to previously asked questions) on Slack: your questions will be visible to the whole class, and can be answered by anyone (faculty, TAs or others in the class).
- There are extensive faculty and TA office hours, and additional small group tutoring can also be arranged (see below)
Note that although we grade homeworks, they are really meant to be a learning aid, not so much a means to assess your understanding of the material. You can do homeworks in a group, if you like, (see the collaboration policy below) and if you get stuck or dont understand a problem, just ask and we will be happy to help (that's what all those office hrs are for!)
You'll find it helpful to practice a bit for the midterm and final, as time permits, since these are the only assignment we have in the class that are done individually. If you tend to do homeworks in a group and rely heavily on help, you may find it helpful to do additional book problems to get to the point where you can work through problems on your own.
That being said, try not to worry too much about your grade in this class. Most people find their grades improve as they progress through the program, and grades in freshman classes don't get looked at very much. After you've been working for a few years nobody asks about your college grades any more. Even the details of the material you learn in class are soon forgotten (or worse still become obsolete!). The most important thing you learn in engineering classes is how to solve a hard problem in an area that you don't know much about, and how to bounce back when your designs fail. So in some ways failing classes is good practice, but don't fail on purpose!
Faculty contact information:
Professor Allan. Bower |
Professor Yue Qi |
Professor Yuri Bazilevs |
Graduate TA
Weican Li
[email protected]
ResearchGate Page >
Head TA:
Amy Oh
[email protected]
Linkedin Page >
Office Hour TAs:
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Design Project TAs
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Textbooks and Reference Material:
There is no required text for this course: the main reference will be the online notes. However, you may find it helpful to buy a textbook to provide a source of additional practice problems, as well as another perspective on the course content.
There are huge numbers of textbooks on dynamics. The available offerings differ in style, although their content is very similar. The book that will work best for you is usually a matter of preference. A few suggestions are given below.
Nelson, Best, McLean and Potter, 'Engineering Mechanics: Dynamics' Schaum's outlines McGraw Hill 2010 Really cheap, short, with lots of (rather easy) problems. Amazon link>>
Bedford and Fowler Dynamics Amazon link>>
Hibbeler Engineering Mechanics: Dynamics, 12th edition, Prentice Hall. Amazon link>>
Beer (you wish...) Johnston et al Dynamics Amazon Link>>
Riley and Sturges Dynamics Amazon Link>>
Meriam and Kraige 'Engineering Mechanics: Dynamics:' (7th edition) free pdf>>
Meriam and Kraige 'Engineering Mechanics: Dynamics:' (8th edition) Amazon Link>>
It is not necessary to buy the latest edition of these books - Newton's laws haven't changed appreciably in the last few years. You will also find that some of the textbooks don't contain much in the way of realistic engineering applications in their problem sets. They will help you to understand the basic principles, but perhaps not to apply them to practice.
Class Schedule and Room Assignments:
Main Lectures: on video >>
Recitation Sections will be used for small group in-person meetings on Mon or Wed, and occasionally on Fri for design project presentations at the following times:
- 9:00-9:50 Room Barus-Holley 157 or room B&H 096 (see the Tutorial Schedule)
- 10:00-10:50 Room Barus-Holley 157 or room B&H 096 (see the Tutorial Schedule)
- 11:00-11:50 Room Barus-Holley 157 or room B&H 096 (see the Tutorial Schedule)
- 1:00-1:50 Room Barus-Holley 141 or room B&H 096 (see the Tutorial Schedule)
- 2:00-2:50 Room Barus-Holley 141 or room B&H 096 (see the Tutorial Schedule)
Tutoring:
We have several tutors who specialize in EN40 and who are available for small group tutoring through the Dean of the College Tutoring office. Tutoring groups are structured classes, in which the instructor works through a prepared lesson plan with a group of 4-6 students. They will work on example problems similar to HW assignments and design projects, but will not usually provide homework help.
If you would like to arrange tutoring please apply on the Dean of the College tutoring webpage (see also information from the Sheridan Center) Contact info for the tutors is provided below for your convenience, but the tutors won't be able to help you until you've completed the Dean of the College application. You can apply for tutoring at any stage of the semester, but the groups tend to fill up later in the semester. Early applicants are more likely to get into a tutoring group.
Grading Policy
You can elect to take ENGN40 for a grade, or S/NC. If you are just trying out engineering, or have other commitments that will make it difficult to put a lot of time into this class, you might be interested in taking the class S/NC. The grading scheme for the S/NC will give you more flexibility to manage your schedule. And you will take many challenging classes in later semesters for a grade, so (except for ridiculously competitive things like Rhodes scholarships) nobody will be concerned about an S grade in an intro STEM class on your transcript.
If you decide to take the class for a grade, your final grade will be based on a numerical score in the course, determined as follows
- Homework (lowest HW grade will be dropped as an automatic extension): 30%
One HW may be submitted up to a week late without penalty (other than the final problem set, due on April 29th, which must be completed by the deadilne (because we need to post solutions for the rest of the class).- Tutorial attendance/slides: 10%
- Final Examination: 30%
- Design Projects: 7.5% each
Letter grades are assigned based on the distribution of total course grades. There is no magic score corresponding to an A, B or C (because we dont want to penalize people if we accidentally set an exam that is harder than usual). Generally, 30% or so of the class will get an A grade. Note that exam grades have a much larger standard deviation than grades on homework, projects, and attendance. Consequently, the final exam will have a bigger effect on grades than the relatively small 30% contribution to the total score suggests.
Although grades are curved, an overall score over 90% has always been sufficient for an A; an overall score over 80% has been sufficient for a B, and a score over 60% has been sufficient to pass.
If you decide to take the class S/NC To pass the class, you must
- Complete all four design projects
- Obtain a grade of at least 50% for tutorial participation
- Either: submit solutions to all the problem sets. The final problem set, due on April 29th, must be completed by the deadilne (because we need to post solutions for the rest of the class). You may submit up to 3 of the other problem sets up to a week late, but late submissions will not be graded. You must achieve an average grade of at least 60% on the homeworks you submit on time (individual HWs can drop below 60%).. If you are able to meet these homework criteria, you need not take the final exam (of course you may still do so if you wish!)
- Or: (i) Submit solutions to at least 5 of the problem sets by the deadline, and obtain a grade of at least 60% on these; and (ii) Obtain a grade of at least 35% on the final exam.
- For an S grade with distinction (equivalent to an A) we need to be able to calculate a grade for you. So if you would like to try for an SDIST please follow the grading policy for the G option - i.e. complete all the projects, submit at least 7HWs (one may be late), and take the final.
Regrettably in a class of this size it is not feasible for us to assign special projects to make up for missed homework, project work, or poor performance on examinations
We will follow the tenets of the Academic Honor Code of Brown University. Honor code violations may result in loss of credit for the assignment involved, loss of credit for the course, or additional penalties as determined by the academic disciplinary committee.
Finally, ENGN40 is not a 'weed out' class - engn40 students are always very smart (even though it may not always feel that way - engineering has a way of making all of us feel dumb sometimes) and only a few people don't complete the class successfully each year. This is usually because they fall far behind (often because of issues unrelated to the class) and are missing grades for multiple components of the class. They often complete the class successfully the following year. So don't stress over not making a passing grade - if you keep up with the work, you will certainly get credit for the class, even if you have a few low scores on some assignments.
Submitting work and collecting graded assignments
Projects: are all submitted electronically on Canvas. Only one member of your project team will need to upload the assignment - Canvas should automatically assign a grade to other members of the team. For this to work, please make sure all members of your design project group have signed up in Canvas in a project group before submitting the assignment.
Homework: Will be submitted and graded via Canvas. Please scan (or type) your homework and submit a pdf copy. Please check the uploaded file after submitting it. People often do the homework correctly and then submit the wrong file or miss a page, etc. If this is discovered too late there is generally nothing we can do about it.
Deadline Extensions
There are no extensions on deadlines other than those available through the regular grading policy. This is partly so everyone knows what options are available ahead of time and we treat everyone the same way, and partly because late submissions make it difficult for the graders to manage their schedules, and delay us from posting solutions to the assignments. To help manage your schedule, note that:
- We drop the lowest HW grade, which is meant as an automatic excuse to be used in emergency.
- The S/NC option allows you to submit some HWs late, or not submit several homeworks and take the final instead. If your circumstances will make it difficult to meet the assignment deadlines do please take the class S/NC and make use of this flexibility.
- Design project work is due on the due date, but if people are unable to attend the design project tests, a make-up test will be arranged.
Grade change requests
If you find that your grades have been added incorrectly, or you would like a grade on your homework, examination or laboratory assignment reconsidered, you should
- Fill out the regrade request form;
- We will keep the assignment until final grades are being determined, and if your final grade is close enough to a grade borderline for the change to have any effect the assignment will be re-graded.
Please bear in mind that your assignments are graded by a large number of undergrad TAs, graduate TAs and faculty. It is impossible to guarantee consistency between grading of different graders - instead, we try to make sure that your assignments are cycled through the various graders.
Also note that each entire HW set amounts to about 3.6% of your final grade, and hence each problem amounts to less than 0.3% of your final grade, and each point of each problem about 0.05% of your final grade. It's not worth worrying about a few points here and there!
Collaboration Policy
Homeworks: You may work on homework problems as a group. However, any work submitted for grading must represent work done by the person who will receive credit for the assignment. It is not acceptable for two students to submit identical copies of a homework problem. It is not acceptable for one student to copy work previously done by another. COPYING MATLAB PROGRAMS IS FORBIDDEN.
Design Projects: Collaboration is required on group design projects. It is important for all team members to bear an equal share of the work involved in the project. You will be asked to assign a grade to each of your team mates in the project, based in part on their level of contribution to the project. Part of the grade for the project will be based on team evaluations.
Examinations: No collaboration of any kind is permitted on examinations. Duh!