ANALYTICAL AND NUMERICAL APPROACH IN THE COURSE MECHANICS FOR TEACHING THE DYNAMICS OF TWO-DIMENSIONAL PARABOLIC MOTION

Abstract

The concept of motion is one of the broad subjects in Mechanics in which many students still have difficulty in understanding the concept.  Several factors that might contribute to this problem include the abstract nature of some of the material so that students facing difficulties in conceiving the topic and the learning method that only relies on presenting mathematical equations. Based on the current curriculum, the discussion in Mechanics usually stops at mathematical formulations, while physical case modeling falls into the realm of Computational Physics. In fact, students will gain a more complete understanding of a phenomenon if they master the mathematical formulation and can see it in a visualization. Therefore, in this work we propose to apply both analytical and numerical approach in teaching Mechanics, especially in the topic of two-dimensional parabolic motion.  Analytical approach was done by formulating mathematical analysis.  Meanwhile, for numerical approach, a simulation application was developed using numerical method of Euler, Feynman-Newton and Runge-Kutta to solve the governing equation of the motion.