Harry H. Cheng
ABSTRACT
The CH programming environment is an open system. Users can enhance the system through its various user interfaces. CH is specially designed for applications in mechanical systems engineering, although it is applicable to many other disciplines as well. CH has been successfully used as a teaching and learning tool for an undergraduate course, Computer-Aided Mechanism Design, at the University of California, Davis in Fall 1993. In this paper we will present the CH programming environment and programming features developed for teaching and student learning. We will describe how a teaching toolbox is developed and used for teaching mechanism design. Source codes in the teaching toolbox are available to students so that they can study the software implementation of algorithms and modify the codes to solve the similar problems. Although the developed teaching toolbox is specific for instruction on mechanism design, the CH programming environment and ideas presented in this paper are general, and they are applicable to instructional improvement for a wide range of subjects in engineering.