Teaching Science and Engineering using MicroStation

MicroStation’s powerful set of tools to model, view, parameterize, animate and interact make it a great learning environment. It may not replace the conventional classroom or the textbooks, but the rich visual learning experience it can offer, is hardly matched by traditional means of teaching.

Using pictures and diagrams in teaching is not a new idea. The textbooks carry plenty of those and teachers too sketch them on the board. But try to remember an occasion where pictures played the central and not a supplementary role - where visual means were exclusively used to drive the core concept home. Any luck? I for one, draw a blank.

Choosing between text and pictures (or equations and graphics) is not merely a matter of taste. Learning through pictures is more intuitive and often occurs at a deeper sub-verbal level. Remember the signage for say ‘Drinking Water’ or ‘Baggage Claim’ at an airport? Pictures achieve an instant, universal and complete communication there.

Contrast that with this example from grade IV: “Why can’t we add ½ and ¾ without taking the LCM (least common multiple) of 2 and 4?”. We were told that these are ‘dissimilar’ fractions. But that just shifted the confusion to “What are dissimilar fractions?” Why are fractions with the same denominators ‘similar’ but those with merely the same numerator are not? Most of us had to accept this abstraction on faith. It was quite a leap from pictures of pizza slices which initially promised fractions to be a fun topic. Well, the fun might have continued if a compelling graphical explanation was given to us. That is the difference I am talking about.

We will look at that such explanations and some examples where MicroStation offers unique insights, but to get the taste of it right away, take a look at http://www.youtube.com/user/UjjwalRane . As of now, it has about 100 clips from physics, engineering, geometry and even geography.

This approach was also tested in a real life classroom over an entire semester of Theory of Machines – a second year mechanical engineering subject. That year the results were dramatically different! Some even dubbed it as ‘historic’.

This entire content was created in MicroStation: models one could push-pull with mouse, animations that could be varied to test what-ifs, lab simulations that could be interacted with . . . The course was additionally supplemented with a book in both paper and interactive e-format – again entirely created in MicroStation. In this blog we will discuss some of these exhibits and the specific MicroStation tools that were used in their creation. Most time we will point to the corresponding video clip on YouTube.

Let's re-learn . . . with pictures!

Parents
  • Hello Colin,

    First, sorry for not replying earlier. I thought I had hit a snag while posting the blog and assumed it did not go through - till I noticed it on my home page today. Your comment was an added bonus!

    Couldn’t agree with you more that the best way of using this content would be a hands on interaction with the DGNs using MicroStation. Students and faculty developing similar content on their own would be a great next step. I have assembled a minimal set of tools and functionality one needs to learn to get started into a course of sorts. Haven’t had an opportunity to actually teach it to a class of teachers and/or students though.

    Putting it out in a book form is a great suggestion. Preserving the interactivity would be a challenge we would need to figure out.

Comment
  • Hello Colin,

    First, sorry for not replying earlier. I thought I had hit a snag while posting the blog and assumed it did not go through - till I noticed it on my home page today. Your comment was an added bonus!

    Couldn’t agree with you more that the best way of using this content would be a hands on interaction with the DGNs using MicroStation. Students and faculty developing similar content on their own would be a great next step. I have assembled a minimal set of tools and functionality one needs to learn to get started into a course of sorts. Haven’t had an opportunity to actually teach it to a class of teachers and/or students though.

    Putting it out in a book form is a great suggestion. Preserving the interactivity would be a challenge we would need to figure out.

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