Promoting And Assessing An Intuitive Understanding In A Junior Level Modeling Course

Abstract : Many faculty have observed that even the best engineering students have difficulty taking a complicated real-life device and developing a tractable mathematical model of its operation for the purposes of simulation or control design. We feel that the major obstacles to this desired outcome stem from three deficiencies. 1. Difficulty in using appropriate simplifying assumptions to render a tractable mathematical model of a complex device. 2. A lack of experience in designing experiments to measure physical parameters of a device and a lack of intuitive understanding of the appropriate ranges of these parameters. 3. Failure to use electronic resources such as databases and internet to discover how more complicated devices, not discussed in lecture, operate. In fact these issues are explicitly addressed in ABET's Criteria for Accrediting Engineering Programs. While traditional textbook and exam problems do a fine job conveying the procedural and mathematical concepts of modeling physical systems, it is much more difficult to give students an understanding of the artful aspects of the modeling process outlined above. In this paper we describe a series of laboratory and homework exercises designed to help students hone these skills discuss how to assess their performance on the exercises and share the results of student opinion surveys.