Dynamics course for Engineering by Scott Reckinger

About this course

Build the dynamics intuition that mechanical and industrial engineering problems demand, and turn formulas into tools you can apply with confidence. This free online course strengthens the core skill behind everything from vehicle motion and mechanisms to rotating machinery: predicting motion and linking it to forces. You will learn to translate real physical situations into clean models, choose an efficient coordinate system, and interpret results in a way that supports sound engineering decisions.

The course begins by reconnecting you with Newton’s laws and the prerequisites that make later topics easier, then moves into particle motion with a practical emphasis on how position, velocity, and acceleration describe what is happening in time. As the motion becomes more realistic, you’ll develop comfort with rectilinear and curvilinear kinematics, including natural (normal/tangential) and polar or cylindrical descriptions. Along the way, you’ll see how curvature, centripetal effects, and rotating frames change what acceleration means and how engineers compute it.

From there, the focus shifts to kinetics: how forces, work, energy, and momentum determine motion. You’ll practice connecting free-body reasoning to acceleration, then learn when an energy approach is faster and when impulse-momentum is the better shortcut, especially for collisions and brief high-force events. The progression prepares you to handle both straightforward calculations and multi-step situations where accelerations depend on time, velocity, or geometry.

The second half expands from particles to rigid bodies. You will develop a reliable method for relative velocity and acceleration in planar motion, including rolling and sliding contacts, and you’ll gain fluency with moving reference frames where apparent effects such as Coriolis acceleration appear. Kinetic ideas are then applied to rigid bodies through force–mass–acceleration relations, work-energy methods, and angular impulse, helping you reason about rotation, impact, and the role of mass distribution via moments of inertia.

Finally, the course transitions into three-dimensional rigid body motion and the geometric concepts that support it, culminating in an introduction to Euler’s equations and the value of principal frames. With frequent conceptual checks and problem-focused exercises, you’ll reinforce understanding as you go, making this a practical option for exam preparation, a foundation for advanced mechanics, or a skills boost for engineering work involving motion and forces.