Enhancing Engineering Education via Physical Experiments: The Case of Learning Energy Storage with a Flywheel System

Abstract

Abstract Design thinking is complex that is hard to learn and harder to teach. The purpose of engineering education is to graduate engineers who can design (Dym CL, 2005). How to enhance students’ reasoning and cognizing about data has gained an increasingly visible role in the K-12 curriculum (Doerr H. M. and Lyn D., 2003). In order to enhance teaching and learning engineering mathematics, a modeling approach by shifting the focus on finding solutions to a particular problem to create a system is proposed in this study. Besides, a training process for the college students who are intending to be the instructors of guiding physical experiments is included. Nonlinear systems, signifying any system is not linear, cannot satisfy the superposition principle. In this paper, a new modeling method for nonlinear systems based on an Adaptive Network-Fuzzy Inference System (ANFIS) for operation and practice was used (Jang, J.S.R., 1993). Through this method, students were able to learn how the transfer functions work for identifying an unknown system. This method had well helped the participated students how the nature of nonlinear system is and how to find out the optimal solutions in controls.