Ron Roth ’69 has developed an alternative method to finding answers to design questions.
A DYNAMIC APPROACH Ron Roth ’69, Professor of Mechanical and Mechatronic Engineering, California State University, Chico
D
uring 30 years of teaching, Ron Roth ’69 has developed a few “tricks,” including
some that have helped his students learn to analyze complex systems. Roth has taught dynamics at Stanford, Fresno
State, UC Berkeley, and the University of Auck- land (New Zealand). Now at California State Uni- versity, Chico (since 1986), he has questioned the traditional approach offered by popular dynamics textbooks and developed an alternative method to finding answers to design questions. “My objective is to get students to write equa- tions of motion of mechanical systems,” said Roth. “Most of the textbooks don’t emphasize that.”
17 Har vey Mudd College SPRING 20 11
He said most books barely talk about equations of motion, the solutions of which are used to simu- late the motion of physical systems. As a student at Mudd, Roth recalls noticing that to solve a dynam- ics problem it seemed one had to see the “trick” to the problem. Without seeing the trick, it was dif- ficult to proceed. Roth’s method breaks down analysis of dynam- ical systems into a series of steps that can be applied to nearly all dynamics problems. “I’ve got it down to 12 things I call elementary tasks, and they culminate with writing equations of motion,” he said. Instead of the typical textbook’s emphasis on three distinct ways to solve dynam- ics problems, Roth teaches a single,
structured
approach that provides the novice to advanced student an algorithmic—and less frustrating— method which (nearly) always works.
BEIRON ANDERSSON
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