The flipped classroom approach has been one of the hottest topics among faculty and students for engineering education. Some like it and believe that it could be one of the best teaching methods because it increases the interaction between faculty and students, and focuses on problem solving. However some faculty and students dislike the approach because they believe that direct interactive lecturing in the traditional classroom approach is more effective. In order to test the flipped classroom approach, we chose one chapter of engineering dynamics and tried the flipped classroom approach in the summer of 2014. At the end of the experiment, a student survey was utilized to collect students' feedback. This paper presents our experiment with the flipped classroom approach, including preparation, execution, survey results, observations and findings. One interesting observation from this trial was that students with higher grades in the traditional classroom approach liked the flipped classroom approach and students with mediocre grades or lower in the traditional classroom approach disliked the flipped classroom approach. For the faculty without funding support and faculty teaching relief, a partial flipped class is a starting point in order to try the flipped classroom approach. With a partial flipped class, both faculty and students could still test the approach and had much deeper understanding of the approach.

since 2001 with 14 years of prior full time industrial experience. He has worked in the design of various technologies from advanced underwater and ultrahigh altitude propulsion systems to automated manufacturing equipment. His interests include advanced thermal and mechanical system design for green power generation.

since 2001 with 14 years of prior full time industrial experience. He has worked in the design of various technologies from advanced underwater and ultrahigh altitude propulsion systems to automated manufacturing equipment. His interests include advanced thermal and mechanical system design for green power generation.

Ali R. Moazed is a Professor in the Mechanical Engineering and Technology department at Wentworth Institute of Technology. In addition to twenty five years of industrial and consulting experience, he has taught mechanical engineering courses full or part-time prior to joining Wentworth in 2001. At Wentworth, he teaches design related courses in the solid mechanics area. He believes in teaching from the perspective of a practicing academician by bringing into the classroom topics related to the practice of engineering, along with the latest pedagogical tools.His expertise is in the area of Applied Finite Element Analysis (FEA) and as an engineering consultant, he provides FEA services to the Utility, Industrial, and Commercial clients nationwide. These services include design analysis, design verification, design modification, design optimization, and failure analysis. He is a registered professional engineer in states of Massachusetts and California. The Design Projects for the Simulation Based Design Course AbstractThe course MECH625-simulation-based design in our program was mainly to conduct FEA (Finite Element Analysis) on components and assemblies to provide stress/strain information. Through our program assessment, it was found that students who performed excellently in the previous MECH625 course had some difficulties incorporating FEA simulation correctly and efficiently on their senior design projects. In fall 2014, we decided to modify the course and created two projects to improve student skills in running FEA simulations on projects. The first project was an individual project in which students were mainly asked to use different simulation skills to run FEA simulations and then compare the FEA results with the theoretical handcalculation results. The second project was a team design project which was to baseline the structural strength of a real device and then redesign it according to the design specifications. During the successful implementation of the two projects in spring semester 2015, the majority of students had strong positive feedbacks about the projects based on the data collected both directly and indirectly. This paper will provide details of the two projects, their implementation and the analyzed results of a student survey.

Statics and Strength of Materials are two core technical courses for any mechanical program. In Statics, vector operations: the parallelogram law, the triangle rule and the polygon rule are introduced and explained in the first two weeks. Many students, especially in the mechanical engineering technology program have difficulty using vector operations to obtain a resultant magnitude or its direction by the trigonometry approach because some students have forgotten the laws of sine and cosine. In the case of Strength of Materials, many students have a hard time understanding the stress concentration phenomena and some assumptions for stress formulas under different loadings. Some students are puzzled about the purpose and the approach of the Mohr's circle so they only sketch the Mohr's circle for visualization purposes but still use stress transformations to calculate the stresses at different orientations. Since 2010 we have introduced the idea of using the sketch tools in SolidWorks to run vector operations for statics and to draw Mohr's circle for determining the stresses at a given orientation. We also have used SolidWorks Simulation as a virtual lab and an alternative approach to visualize the stress distributions to facilitate student's understanding of stress concentration phenomena, and the assumptions of stress formulas under shear, bending and torsion loadings. The application of SolidWorks in Statics and Strength of Materials courses since 2010 will be summarized, presented and discussed in this paper. Results of student surveys conducted in the fall of 2011using the application of SolidWorks in these two courses will also be presented in this paper. According to the survey, students favored the application of SolidWorks in these two courses and would like to see more integration of SolidWorks in Statics and Strength of Materials courses.