MOBILE APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT FOR LEARNING MECHANICS OF MATERIALS

Resumo

This work presents Mechanics of Materials 3D, a mobile application initially targeting the
Android platform. This app is the result of a beginner's research program at the Federal University of
Minas Gerais, whose objective is to design a tool to help students to learn elementary concepts of
Mechanics of Materials, especially in the study of stress states. The fundamental idea of the project was
to make knowledge more accessible to students by allowing abstract concepts to be better understood
and absorbed through playful interaction and graphic representation. It is an attempt to reconcile
traditional teaching with new learning possibilities provided by technology, with a special focus on the
new generations of students enrolling at universities every year. The application uses the matrix library
JAMA to perform the diagonalization of the stress tensor provided, thereby obtaining the principal
stresses and corresponding directions. In sequence, it gives access to graphical interfaces that present in
an intuitive and interactive way these results, as well as other results such as the Mohr’s circle and the
infinitesimal cube in different configurations (state supplied by the user, principal stresses and maximum
shear stress). These interfaces were elaborated through the synthesis of Java programming, layout design
in the XML markup language, the Android Canvas class along with the OpenGL ES graphic API.