When mechanical majors in higher education educate students, they not only need students to master basic theoretical knowledge, but also need students to have the ability of mechanical design innovation, so they need to strengthen the scientific method and scientific thinking education. How to cultivate students’ mechanical innovation design ability is the most important issue for teachers of mechanical majors.

As a basic technical course that must be studied by mechanical students, mechanical principles course contains basic theories such as mechanism and machine dynamics, and it needs to cultivate students with preliminary design ability, so that students can have better theoretical foundation and innovation ability in their future study and work.

  Teaching Status of Mechanical Principles Course

  The course of mechanical principles involves mechanism, machine dynamics, mechanism design, etc., which requires high basic knowledge of mathematics, physics and mechanics, and the course of mechanical principles has the characteristics of strong theoretical, practical and extensive content, so students will have certain difficulties in the learning process, which brings teachers certain teaching problems.

  In the traditional teaching of mechanical principles course, teachers tend to pass the problems, contents and conclusions of mechanical principles course directly to students in order to improve teaching efficiency, and let students forcibly remember the course contents by repeated application and rote memorization.

However, this teaching method will make students unable to understand the reason of the conclusion and the formula involved in the course content from where, which will lead to students in learning and applying the content, only know how to copy and apply, do not know the meaning of the conclusion and formula, is not conducive to the cultivation of students’ initiative, and will make students gradually lose enthusiasm for learning mechanical principles course.

Students passively accept the knowledge of teaching methods, and in the learning process lack of active thinking, will affect the students’ innovative ability, and nowadays China’s mechanical manufacturing industry needs innovative talent requirements do not match. Nowadays, China advocates quality education and is committed to cultivating students’ innovation consciousness and innovation ability, so teachers of mechanical principles need to strengthen the teaching structure of the course and improve the teaching methods.

  The scientific method and scientific thinking education way of mechanical principle course

  (A) research teaching method

  Mechanical students in the mechanical principles course, not only need to focus on mastering the textbook knowledge, but also need to focus on mastering the learning process, so as to obtain the ability of independent learning. The research teaching method is a teaching process that allows students to master the relevant knowledge independently by setting up problems and guiding them to conduct research and discussion. When setting questions, we should pay attention to the novelty of the questions to ensure that they can arouse students’ interest in learning.

  For example, when teaching mechanism composition, teachers can first guide students to understand the principle of mechanism composition, so that students can clarify the basic structure plus a number of basic rod group can form any plane mechanism. Then the teacher can play a structure diagram of a mechanism through multimedia and let students analyze whether this mechanism can do its work and meet the design requirements of the mechanism designer by viewing the structure diagram.

This method of teaching by combining theory and practice can quickly raise students’ interest in learning, allowing them to use their knowledge and course knowledge to analyze and discuss the structure drawing, thus enlivening the classroom atmosphere and putting them into active thinking mode.

The teacher needs to guide students to analyze what problems exist in this structure diagram and how to make improvements, so that students have a clear direction to think about, and apply divergent thinking in that direction for teaching content and use it to express their views on the problems of the structure diagram and propose improvement measures in class. Students will be more enthusiastic about learning after they have learned to think and discuss.

  In addition, teachers can also let students combine their textbook knowledge with actual mechanism models through visits to mechanism models, thus forming the more vague and abstract knowledge in their thinking into figurative and vivid knowledge. After talking about learning and visiting, students will gradually realize that mechanical principles are gradually developed from mechanical applications, which makes students’ thinking more flexible and practical while raising their interest in learning.

  (2) Combination of theory and practice

  The course of mechanical principles is characterized by strong theoretical and practical knowledge. Teachers not only need to let students master theoretical knowledge, but also need to let students consolidate theoretical knowledge through hands-on practice, while improving their hands-on ability. In addition, through hands-on practice, students can analyze the problems that exist in actual engineering and make their thinking more flexible.

  For example, when teachers teach the analytical method of motion of the linkage mechanism, if they only carry out the derivation and solution of the metric, they will often make students unaware of what is going on and feel that teaching is boring and tedious. At this time, teachers can let students independently analyze the motion of the linkage mechanism and combine it with software programming, so that students can draw the motion curve independently, thus improving their practical application ability and making them more enthusiastic about learning.

  (III) Mechanical innovation competition

  Many regions and schools in China have mechanical innovation competitions. Teachers can organize students to set up innovative design groups, so that students can design machines with novelty and practical value through independent innovation and practice. In order to let the design group have a more comprehensive thinking direction, students from different majors can give their design opinions, so as to effectively cultivate students’ thinking innovation ability and hands-on practice ability.

  For example, in 2012, a student had designed a shoe upper cleaning machine that can clean the shoe upper comprehensively and without any dead angle by using the autotransfer and revolution of planetary gears. The mechanical design is not only innovative, but also has a certain practical value and can be used by other students for reference and learning.

  (IV) Thesis assessment

  In order to cultivate students’ independent thinking ability and innovation ability, teachers can have students write a scientific research report as the assessment method. Students can conduct their own research on the topic according to the direction provided by the teacher, and obtain data by reviewing relevant materials and independent experiments, so as to write a scientific research report. This assessment method can effectively make students take the initiative to learn and explore, effectively cultivate students’ innovation ability, and students can further consolidate their textbook knowledge in the process of writing research reports.

  Conclusion

  To sum up, the course of mechanical principles needs students to master theoretical knowledge perfectly and have good practical ability and innovation ability, so it needs to strengthen the scientific method and scientific thinking education. Through the above analysis, it can be seen that teachers of mechanical principles course need to pay attention to the combination of theory and practice in teaching, and play the effect of cultivating students’ creative consciousness and innovative ability by allowing them to learn and design independently.