Abstract:

Educational multimedia content is an important tool of teaching, as they undoubtedly contribute to the acquisition, understanding and consolidation of knowledge. Engineering courses, especially, benefit much more from the use of educational multimedia content since they refer to objects with physical substance that interact in the real world. It’s almost impossible to present them without, at least, a visual illustration. Among the various means, used by teachers for this purpose, animation seems to support knowledge acquisition in certain areas of engineering. Allowing to present not only the external form but also the internal structure and operation of mechanical components, machines and entire mechanical systems, animation may support the learning process if appropriately introduced in the educational practice. Nowadays, hardware and software allow teachers to overcome the difficulties previously associated with the development of animation. New features have also been made available, such as 3D animation allowing also user interaction. This paper presents the attempt to evaluate the introduction of animation in the teaching of Theory of Machines and Mechanism, a course of the Mechanical Engineering Educators curriculum. Both the results of the students' evaluation of the course content, its perceived usefulness and the satisfaction as well as the students’ performance in the final exams revealed a clear improvement of the learning outcomes, providing evidence about the potential of animation as an appropriate tool for teaching similar technological courses.

Keywords:

Educational animation, Engineering Education, Theory of Machines, Mechanisms.