Correlation Analysis between Students' Cognitive Styles and their Attitude to join Kinematic and Dynamics Open Source Codes Projects

This paper has two main goals. The first one is the presentation to the scientific community of a web site which gathers software tools for kinematic synthesis and dynamic simulation of mechanisms. The second one consists in presenting the method used to evaluate the impact that this site had on the students during its first year of existence. The web site, called KINSYNTH, is open to colleagues who wish use it as open source software library or upload contributions from their students. The system is based on the free access to the source programs and on the open acknowledge to anyone wish authoring one or more codes, or, at least, simply developing new releases of existing codes. The method used to evaluate the impact that KINSYNTH had on the first students involved in this activity is based on the analysis of their answers to a questionnaire. The questions were carefully selected in order to give scores in several different dimensions which try to measure some particular characteristics of the preferred way of learning. The dimensions were tailored on some widespread known model of thinking and learning, namely, Gardner’s Multiple Intelligence model, Cognitive Styles, Learning Styles and Learning preference inventories. The analysis of the students answers have revealed some interesting characteristics of the class, that can be used to improve the teaching activity, as well as the impact of the web site under developments in order to improve its attractiveness and usefulness.