Some thoughts for teaching engineering statics

Abstract

Engineering statics is a core technical and gate-keeper course for any mechanical engineering program. During the last several years, it has been noticed that there are two common critical issues for this course: implementation of the parallelogram law and drawing free-body diagrams. The parallelogram law is used to conduct vector addition and the reversed parallelogram law is used to resolve a vector into two components. This paper will present and explain how to jump over the general applications of the parallelogram law and directly discuss Cartesian vectors addition. We will present and systematically explain all possible five types of free-body diagrams to facilitate students to draw free-body diagrams.