IMECE—Implementation of mathematical, experimental, and computer‐based education: A special application of fluid mechanics for civil and environmental engineering students

Abstract

A novel educational methodology, Implementation of Mathematical, Experimental, and Computer‐based Education (IMECE), where its name was derived from the letters of the word “imece” (a Turkish tradition) by taking into account the integrative meaning of this cultural concept, was proposed to explore the synergistic effect of the conventional mathematical solution procedure, visual application, and MATLAB‐based simulation on the perceptions and learning quality of the engineering students. Within the scope the present research carried out both at the state university (undergraduate and graduate levels) and at the foundation university (undergraduate level), water discharge problem (a special case of the Bernoulli's principle/Toricelli's law) was chosen as an example application. In the study, the experimental results of three different tank models (vertical cylindrical, conical, and spherical) and the solution algorithms written in MATLAB were presented in detail, and new empirical equations were also developed for each laboratory scale system depending on the experimental data. The effectiveness of the proposed IMECE method was evaluated statistically within the framework of both “Student Survey” and “Student Assessment” conducted with the participation of 84 students. Based on the mean scores obtained for all participating students, the results of the statistical tests indicated that the quantitative performance (or effectiveness) of the applied IMECE methodology was determined as 97.73%, 67.36%, and 82.55% for the perception/satisfaction section, the learning section, and the overall evaluation category, respectively.

Educating Engineering Students in Egypt: Recommendations for Improvement

“…Students in the preparatory year should be introduced to practical hands on applications on computers. Thereafter, most courses should encourage students to use Excel applications in solving problems like suggested by Yanase (2017) and Sana (2017) or to utilize open source packages like MATLAB as recommended by Yetilmezsoy (2017) and Niazkar and Afzali (2017). The students can be simply asked to solve the assignments using the software package instead of by hand calculation.…”

MATLAB time-based simulations of projectile motion, pendulum oscillation, and water discharge

“…Water flowing out of a circular hole in a tank is an example of unsteady flow because the fluid mass inside a control volume (CV) varies with time. That is, dm 0 CV ¹ where dm CV is the rate of change of the mass within the CV [3,20]. Using Torricelli's law, the volumetric flow rate is…”

“…Because MATLAB is straightforward to use, it is a perfect computational environment for this task in teaching programming and problem-solving techniques [2,3,[23][24][25][26][27][28]. Several mathematical variables can be easily entered into MATLAB's computing environment as matrices (r×c, where r>1 and c>1), scalars (r×c, where r=c=1), row arrays or horizontal vectors (1×c, where c>1), and column arrays or vertical vectors (r×1, where r>1) [3]. This approach enables complex calculations to be efficiently solved using various built-in functions and/or user-defined functions in M-files [3,24].…”

“…animation, dynamic objects, and visualization of the studied physics phenomena) improves students' perception of the material and help them comprehend it [1]. It is essential to teach students about computational methods, modeling knowledge, and simulation experience to encourage them to create robust and practical solutions to the real-world problems that they will face in their future careers [2,3].…”

“…A synthesis of curriculum development, computational physics, computer science, and physics education will be useful for scientists and students wishing to write their own simulations and develop their own curricular material [6]. Moreover, to support the computer-based applications, inclusion of course-related experiments in the curriculum will offer a remarkable opportunity for both students and disciplinespecific practitioners to comprehend the theoretical issues in a visual manner [3].…”