Through Engineers' Eyes

This quick video highlights your progress towards Engineers Eyes. The concept wheel shows how it all fits together.

Week 2 concept wheel (Click to expand)

Are forces just a figment of our imagination? If so, they are a very useful one, for example we use forces to explain why an elastic band stretches when you load it.

When you draw a Free Body Diagram, you have to replace the interaction that the object previously had with its surroundings by force arrows. This reveals the forces.

You learnt that force is a vector, and you used trigonometry to split a force vector into components, or combine forces into a resultant.

Your next concept was equilibrium (Newton’s first law). By combining equilibrium with Free Body Diagrams and trigonometry you could find unknown forces – forces in the cables that support a loudspeaker in fact. A very practical application.

You’ve covered a lot of territory. But so far only forces that meet at a point. Next week (Week 3) will introduce twist. It’s useful in its own right but in Week 4 it will complete the toolkit for analysing two-dimentional rigid bodies where forces don’t meet at a point.

Talking points

These are to get you started. Share any other thoughts you’ve had.

• Do you see how the three phases – experiment, analysis and design – combine to help you develop engineers’ eyes?

Share your experiments

Don’t forget to share your experiments on the Through Engineers’ Eyes Padlet wall for this week.