INTERVIEWER: Can you tell us your name and
what course you teach? BUCCIARELLI:
Larry Bucciarelli. I am a professor in the School
of Engineering. And the course I teach in civil
engineering is Solid Mechanics. The number is 1.050.
INTERVIEWER: Can you tell us how the
materials that you have made available through Open
Courseware are actually used in the context of the class?
BUCCIARELLI: Well, on the site you will find
the textbook which is not completed.
Probably never will be completed.
Engineering Mechanics for Structures.
And that is the textbook which the students purchase for the
price of replication by our copy shop, but the chapters are also
available on the Web as pdf files.
INTERVIEWER: OK.
And what do the students do with the materials in class?
Do they read it as homework? Do you have them do exercises
in class? BUCCIARELLI:
I found that the textbook works very well, for me anyway
because, of course, I have written it.
And so, I don't lecture so much anymore.
I ask the students and I inform the students that they are to
read the textbook before class, when the text are assignment.
And that way we can do more interesting things in class
other than myself standing in front of a chalkboard with my
back to the students replicating what is in the text.
INTERVIEWER: Can you describe a typical day
or a typical lecture class meeting?
BUCCIARELLI: Well, again,
I tend not to lecture. I will give some lecture,
but generally I like to go into class and, at some time in the
class, introduce what I call a class exercise of something that
I produced. Again, in pdf file.
Not on Open Courseware because these change from year to year,
but it is on my Stellar site. And there is a little exercise,
very much like a problem set in the problem exercise in the
textbook. And there is a lot of blank
space on the page. And I give these to students.
I ask them to work together in teams of two or three and work
out the exercise. And after maybe ten,
fifteen minutes of that we will go through the exercise.
I will ask the students for their comments and critique.
And, of course, during the exercise I am going
around through the classroom trying to answer their questions
if they have some. And then I will move into maybe
a lecture mode for the duration of the class,
but the idea is to get the students engaged.
INTERVIEWER: Are the students using
computers in the class or are they doing this on paper?
BUCCIARELLI: They are doing this on paper.
This is a first course in engineering, a required course
in civil engineering. Most of the students are
sophomores. For most of the students it is
their first course in engineering, but we do get some
students from architecture who are in their third and fourth
years. So, as a first course in
engineering, the emphasis is on the fundamentals.
Now, fundamentals in two senses.
The fundamentals of the theory, which come over from physics
and engineering mechanics. The title of the book is
Engineering Mechanics for Structures.
But fundamentals also in the sense of what is engineering
work like? How do engineers make use of
approximations, estimations and certain models?
So all of this is not the kind of online productive production
activity of using a computer, say, for exploring options in a
design setting. Though, I do emphasize a design
context for some of my exercises in the course.
INTERVIEWER: Can you say more about those
exercises or what kind of homework that the students do?
BUCCIARELLI: Again, there are several kinds.
I have mentioned the class exercise.
There are also standard home problems.
Perhaps not so standard if you look at the exercises at the end
of the chapters, but let's call those standard
back of the chapter exercises. And they are standard in the
sense that generally they have one answer.
But there is another kind of exercise which I highlight and
which counts 40% of the grade in the course, and these I call
design or open-ended exercises. And the students tackle six of
these during the course of the semester.
They are conceptual exercises. They are exercises in which
there is no one solution. Some are shown in the textbook.
For example, a diving board for a world
market. There is no one answer,
and so they must document their arguments and justification for
their designs. And that they do in a journal,
$1.50, $2.00 or something like that.
And, of course, that is a different kind of
exercise for faculty, too.
And there, in several ways, one, it is going to take longer
to evaluate the exercise. Though, perhaps a teaching
assistant might help in that. Two, and more important,
it is different in the attitude or the perspective that the
faculty has to take on the exercise.
It is no longer a case where there is a single answer,
nor even perhaps a single method.
So that means the faculty has to become a listener and not
just a lecturer in class. Generally, the way I handle
these design exercises is to go in with a class exercise that is
related to the upcoming design exercise.
Have the student work through that.
After all, the purpose of this is not to teach design.
That is not my intent. My purpose is to teach the
fundamentals of engineering mechanics, of structures,
but to do it in a way where the students are engaged as they
were taking on an engineering project or a design project.
So this means that, again, there is no single
answer, no single method. That it is important that
students participate in the formulation of the problem and
setting out constraints in talking about the kind of
resources they can make use. And here I let them use the Web
if they like. They can call home to find out
the size of the diving board in their backyard,
if they have one. As long as they report and
reference their sources. I find that these design
exercises work very well. And, if I can say,
this is the commercial part, I guess, of the broadcast.
And the students recognize that.
Let me just read some comments from the evaluation,
if I can, which I just received.
They say things like Professor Bucciarelli makes this class
difficult and fun at the same time.
Another. I found the content very
difficult but also very challenging.
I enjoyed it greatly and understood the concept but have
difficulty completing exercises. I really enjoyed the class
because it was taught in a way that made the material
interesting to us. The design exercises were
extremely hard and time exhausting, but they were very
interesting to do and they are the reason I learned the
material. Now, that, in a way,
is the kind of response I welcome.
And it has generally been the case that students do take to
the design exercise, even though they are difficult.
I recall one journal when I myself was up very late in the
night evaluating the journals, and here was this statement
after pages and pages. The student had written it is
2:00 AM in the morning and I am going around in circles.
And I wrote back great, you have discovered that design
is an iterative process. Now, I could go in and lecture
about design is an iterative process.
The students wouldn't understand a damn thing about
what I was saying, but when they experience it
themselves that is when learning happens.
INTERVIEWER: So how else would you assess
them if you said that is 40% of their grade?
Through problem sets, quizzes?
BUCCIARELLI: Yeah, sure.
As show in the syllabus which is also posted,
you will see that I think it is 40% that is on the design
exercises, 30% on the quizzes, two quizzes,
standard quizzes again, and 30% on a final exam.
I do not grade the problem sets they are evaluated.
There are weekly problems sets. They are evaluated by the
teaching assistant. And we tell students to come
and see us if we note that they are having some problems there.
But, of course, not all the students tackle the
problems. After a while,
you know, the course becomes hard enough in itself in all its
other ways. And students set their
priorities and have to engage the design exercises,
quizzes of course. And that is one of the reasons
why I use these class exercises as well because they,
in a sense, are like problem sets.
INTERVIEWER: Do you anticipate making any
changes to the class in the future or are you happy with the
way it is going now? BUCCIARELLI:
I am quite happy. I am continually making changes
in the sense of updating the textbook.
I might warn any user or reader of the text that there are some
places where there are some typos and things like that,
some are quite serious. And those are usually obvious,
though. I don't anticipate changing the
course to a great extent. I should mention there is a
laboratory course that goes along with it,
which is half the units of the Solid Mechanics course,
so it is a problem of integrating lab exercises,
lab experiments with the content of the course.
And that has taken a while, but that seems to work quite
well, too. INTERVIEWER:
Is there anything you want to say about the laboratory course?
BUCCIARELLI: Well, again,
my attitude, and my attitude there is not to
do cookbook laboratories. That is the student goes down
and turns a few dials and watches a few outputs,
but to try to gauge the students with the setting up of
an experiment which is very important.
And all kinds of things can go wrong with that,
and I want them to experience that.
I want them to have some sense of what kind of instrumentation
is available. And here we consciously use
some very crude forms of instrumentation in the early
experiments like dial gauges and even meter sticks.
And then later on we move to things like LBDTs for measuring
displacement in strain gauges for measuring,
again, strains. So there is an emphasis on the
experience of setting up an experiment.
There is emphasis upon instrumentation and seeing how
that can also, how powerful certain points of
instrumentation can be, but also how open to,
not misuse, well, misuse and things going wrong
happens there. So, again, the idea is to have
the student experience the context of engineering work as
much as, say, the principles of the
fundamentals of the content or the focus in terms of structures
and mechanics. Of course, report writing is
also an element of the course. INTERVIEWER:
Great. Well, thank you very much for
sharing your materials with MIT OpenCourseWare.
We appreciate it. Are there any last thoughts you
have on your teaching of either of these courses?
BUCCIARELLI: Well, no.
That's enough. INTERVIEWER:
Great. Well, thanks for your time.
BUCCIARELLI: OK.