Building a Smart Curriculum for Core Engineering Courses through Teacher-Student-AI Interaction: The Case of Mechanics of Materials

Abstract

China’s national push for educational digitalization has made a lot of application-oriented universities rethink how they teach core engineering courses. They are trying to make these courses smarter, and that has become a big part of how they reform talent training now. Mechanics of Materials is a required course for mechanical engineering students, but teaching it well has always been hard. The theories are abstract, and they often feel cut off from real engineering work. Students come in with very different levels of preparation, and teachers just cannot give each student enough personal help in large classes. Our work is based on the provincial first-class undergraduate course at the University of Science and Technology Liaoning. We built a smart curriculum system that puts Teacher-Student-AI Interaction at the center, uses a knowledge graph as its backbone, connects everything through a course-specific AI agent, and runs on multi-dimensional evaluation. What we saw in actual teaching shows that this system helps fix old problems that traditional teaching has had for a long time. Students end up with better knowledge and stronger engineering practice skills. We think this gives other application-oriented universities a model they can use for their own foundation courses.