Welcome to resonance’s documentation!

Resonance is a companion software library to an interactive textbook written for an upper level undergraduate introduction to mechanical vibrations course.

The library is specifically designed for learning engineering principles through computational thinking and computational experimentation and thus we have guidelines on its design to facilitate this. Those guidelines are roughly:

  • Don’t teach programming for the sake of teaching programming. Show students how to solve problems and introduce programming along the way to solve those problems.
  • Hide the fine details of programming and only use simple constructs, so that learning vibrations is highlighted instead of programming.
  • Hide the simulation details (linear/nonlinear ODE solutions), but allow them to be exposed if needed.
  • The software design is centered around the “System” object. Systems represent real things: a car, a bridge, a bicycle, an airplane wing.
  • Students can use and construct systems.
  • Students only create functions, no need to understand classes and their construction.
  • Easy visualizations (time history plots and animations of systems)
  • Extra informative and lots of error messages (try to predict student mistakes)

Indices and tables