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moorepants / resonance

Learning Mechanical Vibration Engineering Through Computation
https://moorepants.github.io/resonance
MIT License
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2. Introducing Mechanical Vibrations By Investigating a Book Oscillating on a Cylindrical Cup Feedback #167

Open MicheleShi opened 6 years ago

MicheleShi commented 6 years ago

Attached are my comments for notebook 2. Overall, this notebook tried to introduce a lot of new concepts, both in coding and in vibrations. The vibrations concepts kind of get lost in teaching all of the resonance system functions. I think the formatting needs to be changed so that the coding information and the vibrations information are clearly differentiated, or this notebook needs to be edited down. There were a lot of objectives and not all of them were addressed or fully fleshed out. Also, many exercises required students to use information that wasn't presented earlier, like calculating the period or using a for loop.

2_Introducing_Mechanical_Vibrations_by_Investigating_a_Book_Oscillating_on_a_Cylindrical_Cup.docx

MicheleShi commented 6 years ago

Questions:

  1. Why is it important to understand the effects of changing the book parameters (length, thickness, cup radius) on the system’s free response?
  2. Is the main goal of this notebook to introduce using resonance or to actually analyze the book on a cup system?
  3. How can we quantify the comparison between the computer simulation and experimental results?

Concerns:

  1. Learning how to use and navigate a resonance system and teaching new vibrations concepts may be a lot to digest
  2. Creating the animation function is not emphasized in future lessons.
  3. The last exercise about plotting the period versus change in mass, length, and radius is worded poorly. Mass, length, and radius are constants so it is confusing to say “change in ….” For this exercise you’d have to write a loop to calculate the trajectories for different mass, length, and radius values, but we had never seen a loop written in Python at this point.
  4. Objective 7 not addressed in this notebook.
  5. Objective 9 seems to serve the main course objectives (e.g. analysis and modeling), but the exercise that pertains to Objective 9 (comparing the video to the simulation in the Time Series Analysis Section) was rushed and also not fleshed out.

Suggestions:

  1. If both a lot of new coding and new vibrations concepts are introduced in a single notebook, the notebook formatting must clearly differentiate the information. Make it easy for students to review the notebook and find the information they are looking for.
  2. May be beneficial to include a review at the end of each notebook with new functions introduced, and key vibrations concepts introduced.
  3. Number the objectives and somehow indicate that a section within the notebook addresses a specific objective. Textbooks have margins for that kind of information, but I don’t know how to clearly show that in a Jupyter notebook.