Can you help us refine the Engineering Statics chapters and add more examples?

[Dan Baker]

Hi Engineering Statics Team!

I hope that you are all doing well enough through this long pandemic and all the other socio-political events we've been enduring. 

Will Haynes has spent this Spring 2021 semester working faithfully on Engineering Statics to move the final chapters into the HTML version, update all the GeoGebra interactives, and generally tidy up and edit the book. Now he needs our help! 

Our plan is to post chapters to Google Docs on 2-3 week cycles throughout the remainder of the spring and summer to have the book in final form by Fall 2021. We'd also like to include more examples, so if you have open-source (non-commercially published) examples for the topics with few or no examples, please share those as well!

We'll be using the "Suggest Mode" in Google Docs to flag edits as Will needs to manually move our edits from the Google Doc over into XML to be read by PreText. Thus: 

• To make small edits: simply add suggested edits or comments to the Google Doc
• To make larger edits or share original examples: Email William Haynes <wha...@maritime.edu> to discuss the best way to make your edit.

Chapter 5 Rigid Body Equilibiryum is now open through May 24, 2021, for editing in Google Docs. 

Direct link to Ch 5: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1YG5VydTYrIrG9D0Q2FmhdfuwIO54UWVc/view?usp=sharing

Please let me know if you have any access issues or questions!

Dan

____________________________________________________

Daniel W Baker Ph.D. PE, Teaching Assistant Professor
  Office:  ENGR B206                       Phone: 970-491-0261
  Email:  dan....@colostate.edu  Twitter: @drdanteaches

  YouTube: DrDanTeaches                Pronouns: he, him

  Working to be a kind & supportive ally to all!

[Henslee, Erin]

Hi Dan,

To save time for examples getting formatted, is there a template or format that we can provide them in?

Thanks!

Erin

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Erin A. Henslee, PhD
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Wake Forest University
Department of Engineering
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[Dan Baker]

Great question, Erin. I'll defer that one to Will Haynes as he's the champion of conversion.

Dan

____________________________________________________

Daniel W Baker Ph.D. PE, Teaching Assistant Professor
  Office:  ENGR B206                       Phone: 970-491-0261
  Email:  dan....@colostate.edu  Twitter: @drdanteaches

  YouTube: DrDanTeaches                Pronouns: he, him

  Working to be a kind & supportive ally to all!

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/engineering-statics-oer-text/CAGNdtAwMhr2if9BGzNx%2B6nLt%2B5BUSZizQE90fGaoO7vRcYWx_Q%40mail.gmail.com.

[William Haynes]

Hi Erin,

Thanks for the question.  

I don’t think it would be efficient or save any time for you to try write questions directly in PreTeXt, which has a fairly steep learning curve and many picky rules. I have  created macros and other time saving tools for myself which means that what would be hard and frustrating for you is not very difficult for me.  If you would like to see what raw PreTeXt code for the book looks like, it is all on GitHub.  Chapter 5 is here: https://github.com/dantheboatman/EngineeringStatics/blob/master/src/ptx/Chapter_05.ptx for example.

So I think the best thing overall would be for you to simply write up example problems in whatever way you are comfortable with and I will take care of the translation.  Just do what you would do to make a handout for your students.

The basic structure of an example in pretext is

Prelude  (optional discussion about the problem)

Problem Statement  (mandatory)

Answer (like you would find in the back of a textbook)

Hint(s)  (zero or more)

Solution(s)  (one or more) Containing free body diagram, equations, and enlightening commentary.

Postlude  (optional discussion summing up )

Things that would help save time are

• If you supply the text in a text document or word, I can copy and paste your words and wrap them with pretext tags.
• If you know LaTeX, provide the equations in that format because typing equations is error prone and hard to proofread, but handwritten is fine too.
• If you write equations using LatTeX, use macros for quantities with units, so for example 10 ft-lb is written \ftlb{10}   The macro definitions are on this page:
• https://github.com/dantheboatman/EngineeringStatics/blob/master/src/ptx/docinfo.ptx
• Diagrams: Either draw them using SVG (scalable vector graphics) or provide a sketch which I will redraw.  I will probably need to edit things to get consistent line weights, colors,and fonts etc.
• Don’t worry much about formatting because that is all controlled by the pretext tags.  I will ensure that variables are italic, vectors are bold etc.
• Let me know exactly where the questions should be inserted.

We can try a few problems and see how it goes.

Will

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[William Haynes]

Dan,

I took a look at the Chapter 5 link on Google drive, and the conversion from PDF → docx →  Google Docs broke a lot of the formatting which is going to make it difficult to proof and edit, so I think we need to keep looking for a better approach for editing and commenting.

Maybe everyone should mark up their own copy of the pdf version, or maybe someone knows a good tool for editing/commenting pdf files or web pages?

Will

[Dan Baker]

Hi Will,

For some reason, the PDF of chapter 5 you sent me crashes Adobe Acrobat DC when I try a conversion to DOCX. So I used an online converter. An alternative might be to keep it as a PDF and add comments online. Adobe appears to offer this as a free functionality but does require users to set up an account. https://www.adobe.com/acrobat/online/pdf-editor.html

Dan

____________________________________________________

Daniel W Baker Ph.D. PE, Teaching Assistant Professor
  Office:  ENGR B206                       Phone: 970-491-0261
  Email:  dan....@colostate.edu  Twitter: @drdanteaches

  YouTube: DrDanTeaches                Pronouns: he, him

  Working to be a kind & supportive ally to all!

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/engineering-statics-oer-text/477B2A2F-11F5-43EE-89A2-270A4AB3C46A%40maritime.edu.

[Dan Baker]

We've discovered that the conversion from PDF into Google Docs left much to be desired. Thus we'll be using the Adobe online review tool. 

https://documentcloud.adobe.com/link/review?uri=urn:aaid:scds:US:fa7d9bef-6d4b-4cf1-851f-e1ed908dcf1f

If you create an account it will mark it with your comments with your name. If you choose not to create an account your comments will be marked with "Guest".

Dan

____________________________________________________

Daniel W Baker Ph.D. PE, Teaching Associate Professor

  Office:  ENGR B206                       Phone: 970-491-0261
  Email:  dan....@colostate.edu  Twitter: @drdanteaches

  YouTube: DrDanTeaches                Pronouns: he, him

  Working to be a kind & supportive ally to all!