statics

I would like to share with fellow mechanicians an educational iPad app I recently developed. The name of the app is Truss Me! and the main goal is to help students, all the way from high school to college, to build intuition on how truss structures behave. The video below highlights some features of the app:

Lecturers - University of Michigan-Shanghai Jiao Tong University Joint Institute

Professor Ed Berger, Univeristy of Virginia Mechanical Engineering, is featured in the Chronicle of Higher Education for his use of web technologies and, in particular, "video solutions" for teaching undergraduate mechanics courses. See http://chronicle.com/weekly/v54/i34/era01301.htm.  Or contact Berger at berger@virginia.edu.  Ed hasn't used this approach for all undergraduate mechanics courses as yet, but the potential is there. 

Since I am an alum of the University of Minnesota, when I was a PhD student I lived only a few blocks from the site of yesterday's catastrophic bridge collapse in Minneapolis.  The statics analysis of a truss is almost the first thing learned by every undergraduate engineering student, and appears to be relevant here.  It is interesting to see words like "fatigue crack" and "vibrations" in the news .  In light of such events,