Teaching Global and Modular Kinematics With a Hypermedia Support

In this paper, we outline the two alternatives we faced in implementing a hypermedia-based educational software for analyzing planar mechanisms by both global and modular approaches. Our software uses a “spatial” information allocation, which is consistent with the physical nature of the problems involved in mechanism simulation, and which follows the paradigm of object-oriented programming. The hypermedia material developed and furnished to students allows them to explore, to carry out individual experiments, to work out projects, and to draw up reports concerning kinematic analysis of linkages.