Promising Practices

I can sing the praises of using examples all day but I figure I'll practice what I preach. We focus on frequency response during a portion of my class. I can talk about Bode plots and bandwidth till I'm blue in the face and my students will nod and say they understand it but they have blank stares on their faces. However, there is (or was) a real life example of what happens when modal (frequency response) analysis is not performed. A bridge, built in the early twentieth century, called the Tacoma Narrows bridge was nick-named Galloping Girdie. Most engineering students have seen film of this bridge undulating like a perverted sine wave. Conjuring that image helps explain that concept applied to the flat plate their studying with accelerometers. I also use cars and other everyday systems to help explain difficult concepts.