From Content Coverage to Competence Development: Shifting Mechanics Education Toward Modeling and Reflection

ABSTRACT

Many engineering courses are still organized according to a predominantly deductive and content‐oriented approach: theoretical foundations are introduced first, while authentic disciplinary activity is often postponed to later stages of the curriculum. This contribution argues that such an approach is insufficient for sustainable competence development in mechanics education. Instead, courses and problem statements should be designed from intended capabilities and observable learning outcomes. The paper discusses how competence‐oriented design requires a deliberate shift from broad content coverage toward depth, repeated application, feedback, interpretation, and justified engineering judgment. Two complementary examples from mechanics courses illustrate this approach. A failure‐analysis task based on a real deep‐sea submersible accident places students in the role of engineering experts and makes modeling, data interpretation, and professional judgment visible. A machine‐dynamics project uses computational tools to overcome restrictions imposed by hand calculations and to foster verification, plausibility checks, and critical assessment of numerical results. The examples show that theoretical foundations and analytical methods remain essential, but their didactic role changes: they become important tools for developing core engineering competencies rather than the endpoint of purely abstract application scenarios.