Foundations of Physical World

This course introduces the fundamental principles of statics, electrical circuits, and mechatronics that form the foundation of modern engineering systems. Students will develop analytical and practical skills for modelling, analyzing, and designing systems that integrate mechanical and electrical components.

• Statics topics:  Adding vectors, components, unit vectors, dot product, cross product with drawings, components and computers; Free-Body Diagrams, force and moment balance for a particle, a rigid object, trusses, mechanisms and frames.
• Circuits topics: Voltage, current, Kirchhoff’s laws, analysis of resistor circuits, Wheatstone bridge, Thevenin and Norton Equivalent circuits, diodes, op amps, instrumentation amps,  simple sensors.
• Mechatronic topics:  Magnets and electromagnets, motors, commutation, strain gauges, force and distance measurement, transmissions, energy conservation and energy loss.

What's wrong with the present general world-wide Freshman Physics for Engineers?  Worldwide, and this applies also to Plaksha's former versions of FoPW,  there is a two-fold motivation for freshman physics for engineers,

• The teaching of the basic physics needed for various engineering disciplines;  and
• Exposure to the basic workings of the world.

On top of this is an evolved response to student pressures, and test-writers' pressures. Writers of books and designers of courses, have learned to teach that which is teachable. And the word 'teachable' primarily means 'testable'.  Given the essentially infinite depth of the two broad areas above, teaching testable skills ends up, in our opinion, treating both aims above at such a superficial level that the education is almost negative.  Students end up understanding things exactly at the level needed for homework problems, problems that are so idealized in stereotypical ways, that students cannot connect the ideas to the real world, or to engineering problems.  And, the cultural exposure to physics that is outside of their future discipline is so superficial that it amounts to some vocabulary and vaguely expressed concepts. The result is that the needed engineering skills of this or that discipline have to be essentially retaught, from the start, in the individual disciplines.

What do engineering students need? At present, engineering students, especially so in India, have little sense of the connection between school skills and physical reality. They even have poor basic understanding of the physical world, including the engineered world.  They have neither a functional ability to work with basic mechanical and electrical items in their living environment, nor an ability to apply math or facts from school to the physical world. 
 
What is the idea of this course?  Relative to the standard physics courses which we have critiqued above, this course can be described by these differences:

• We abandon the cultural education in modern physics.  Not that such a course is a bad idea. Such material is needed in the same ways that history, philosophy, foreign languages,  politics and economics are  needed.  It is just not this course. This course is intended as a functional course for future engineers.
• We want engineers to have an engineering sense of the world. They should have low-level (meaning low in the brain, analogous to neurological muscle control) understanding of mass, force,  torque, power, electrical current, voltage, strength, and distance. They should have a sense of what kinds of manipulations of physical objects are possible, with basic tools. We want to help students look at the world and to be able to think about how things work, why they don't work, and how to fix, design and build things.
• We want students to build a bridge between school work and the physical world. That is, how to actually make use of algebra, linear algebra,  calculus, and computation to understand, design and repair physical things.
• We want students to develop, by means of practice in this course, real-world problem solving. This is not just doing problems for which they have been told the inputs, outputs, and algorithms and for which there are definitive right and wrong answers, but problems for which the inputs, outputs and goodness of solution have to be determined by the student. This involves an engagement of a different type than MCQ-trained students have developed.

What is the core methodology? The core of this course is 15  two-hour labs, with take-home hands-on assignments.  The labs, rather than being pre-designed and built setups for demonstrating a law of physics, will instead be set up by the students using simple supplies and tools.  Basic physics concepts will be demonstrated by the lab activities  but these concepts will be more closely connected to their muscle-memory understanding and will accompany their development of how-to skills in mechanics and electronics. The lectures, tutorials, labs, homework and exams will all be aimed at developing and testing skills related to understanding of, and manipulating of,  items in the physical world. Hence the course title, 'Foundations of the Physical World'.

This course empowers students in the engineered physical world. The primary topics are mechanics (statics), electronics, and mixtures of the two.  The course builds basic hands-on skills, ability to exercise theory and calculations associated with these skills, and a sense of magnitudes of physical quantities.

Students who can, in the end, do all labs, tutorials and homeworks on their own will get high scores on the exam questions.

Students will gain analytical skills, and hands-on skills. Through a combination of theoretical analysis, problem-solving exercises, laboratory activities, and practical engineering examples, students will gain the knowledge required to understand and develop basic mechatronic systems used in robotics, automation, and intelligent machines as listed above. In some more detail than above, this will include:

Analytical skills: 

• Statics: Ability to look at a picture, object, simple structure or simple machine and know how to calculate various geometric or force quantities from other given or measured force or geometric properties.
• Circuits: Ability to look at a circuit diagram or actual circuit and calculate various unknown quantities (e.g., voltage or current) given other quantities.
• Mechatronics: Ability to quantitatively reason about torque, angular velocity, voltage, current and power with respect to motors.  Ability to do quantitative calculations related to force, displacement and strain measurements of elastic solids (e.g., simple load cell).
• Vocabulary and communication:  Ability to reason coherently with words such as: Force, torque, moment, couple, power, work, equilibrium, tension, compression, torsion, stress, strain, angular velocity, transmission ratio, efficiency,  voltage, current, power, dissipation, motor constants, battery, voltage source, resistor, diode, LED, amplifier, op-amp, current loop, nodal voltage, Wheatstone bridge, strain gauge, micro- milli- centi- kilo-  meter, gram,  Newton,  Watt or Joule, Nm,  ohm, Ah, mAh, Calorie, horsepower, etc.
• Hands-on skills:  Ability to usefully and appropriately use, without guidance, and talk usefully about, basic common mechanical and electrical tools including screwdrivers (slotted and Phillips), pliers, needle-nose pliers, combination pliers, hammer, hacksaw, drill and bits, crescent wrench, screws, nuts, bolts, wire strippers, soldering iron, multimeter, breadboard, zero-PCB, solder, flux.
• Real world estimation. Throughout the  lectures, tutorials, labs and homework, students will exercise knowledge of, and estimation of, real world numbers.  Without looking anything up students should be able to say something about, say, the mass of a car;  the mechanical power of human; the total electrical energy use of India; the mass of an ant;  the strength of a string, the amount of arithmetic a computer can do in a second; etc.  And to reason using this information.
• Integration:  Faced with a challenge within the reach of the skills above, students will be able to design, build and debug solutions to basic electrical and mechanical challenges.  This is the central learning outcome and is aimed at the most-important broad educational goal of improving student ability at general real-world problem solving (as opposed to answer-in-the-back-of-the-book homework problem solving). 
  

The interaction of teachers and students has several components. The broad goal is developing student skills.

• Lectures:  2 lectures per week. Conventional format, starting with a short daily quiz. The lectures will have many demonstrations about how to do the things that the students will later exercise.
• Tutorials: 1 hour per week. Students stand in pairs at white boards and do calculations related to building electromechanical devices. These are the same skills that will have been demonstrated in lecture, will be practiced on homework and will be tested in exams. Tutorials will be run by  TAs and student TAs and overseen by professors.
• Labs: Students work in pairs building and testing various electronics and mechanical components. Every student is expected to learn basic competence with a host of mechanical and electrical tools.  The lab skills lead  up to the final competition.  Labs will be run by TAs student TAs and overseen by  Faculty.

Course grade is based on the sum of the best 12 of the following 14 numbers. (+2 for course survey). In each category the last several items will have slightly higher scores so there is no incentive for any student to skip any component at the end of the semester.  The total below is 147.  The percent column is 10/147 of the points, approximately, taking account that  getting a zero on one or another component does not preclude an A+ grade.

Description of Assessments

The course grade is based on all of the course components with various drop-the-lowest aspects within components and between components.  A student can get a perfect grade even if they have missed some  parts of the course for personal, health or other reasons.

In all cases students must fully and completely acknowledge sources of help for all course work.  For homework students are allowed to use all sources of all kinds, up to and including direct copying from the internet or other students.  For tutorials, no sources are allowed (no notes, no internet) except other students and TAs.  For labs, all help is allowed from all sources. For the Final project, all help is allowed from all sources. For scholastic misconduct University policy applies.

Plagiarism Policy for Written Assignments (if applicable)

All things that others might call cheating or copying are allowed so long as they are properly acknowledged. (e.g., This is ok: 'I photocopied problem #2 solution from Sandyha Gorti.'')

• Ruina and Pratap Statics and Dynamics (free online, new edition by 1 August)
• Fiore  (Online electronics books, free online)
• YouTube, Claude, Khan Academy, etc
• Guesstimation: Solving Today's Problems on the Back of a Napkin: Link
• Maths on the Back of an Envelope: Clever ways to (roughly) calculate anything: Link