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The Hands-on Mechanics Story
Hands-on Mechanics was developed through a partnership between the McGraw-Hill Engineering Team and the United States Military Academy at West Point, and based on the fundamental teaching principles of the ExCEEd workshops, held every summer for civil engineering faculty from across the country. The ExCEEd workshops seek to strengthen the teaching abilities of its participants by addressing learning styles, communication skills, class organization, teaching with technology, and classroom assessment techniques, among other topics. Likewise, seminars are augmented by a series of demonstration classes - models of high-quality teaching, presented by ExCEEd faculty mentors. Ultimately, participants learn to expand their teaching repertoire to include three-dimensional, hands-on demonstrations in order to engage students in the subject matter.

However, since creating 3-D teaching tools that address engineering mechanics topics takes time—(they need to be imagined, designed, and built, as well as tested to make sure they are conceptually accurate)—it can often be difficult to incorporate them into courses. This was something all of us at McGraw-Hill knew from years of market research—it was simply too time consuming to develop 3-D teaching aids, especially when publishers and software companies readily provided tutorials, animations, and other online visualization tools. And so, when McGraw-Hill learned that the United States Military Academy had an existing library of classroom-tested, accurate, and effective 3-D teaching demonstrations available, we jumped at the chance to make the blueprints available to engineering professors around the world.
The result is Hands-on Mechanics, a website that not only provides detailed instructions for how to build 3-D teaching tools using materials found in any lab or local hardware store, but also gives professors a community where they can share ideas, trade best practices, and submit their own original demonstrations for posting on the site. With course areas being added every year, we hope to build Hands-on Mechanics into something that will really make a difference in the way you teach engineering mechanics.