Fitness for Purpose: Achieved by "Rediscovering" the Subject Acoustics

Abstract

Today, teaching often means to offer the students an adjusted extract of the complete knowledge achieved during a long time period. Adjusted in regards to the student's priori knowledge, aims of the course etc. This might give access to relevant information, exercise the use of tools and give insight into the theoretical background. However, it hardly gives the chance to follow up the development of this knowledge. It does neither train the capability to model "real-life" problems, which can be considered as a main task for an engineer. Each individual subject has its specific history of discovery. Due to observation, experiment and modelling of problems, progress has been achieved from the "birth" of the subject to its state of today. This development is logically structured due to the increase of knowledge in the subject itself and in other areas supporting research and development. The aim is here to change from the teacher perspective to the natural perspective created by the historical development of the subject and thereby improve the ability of the students to deal with new acoustical problems in their future career. The idea of the proposed project is for the students to "rediscover" the subject acoustics by following in the footsteps of the subject s development and remake relevant observations, experiments and modelling which led to today's state of the art in the subject. This will train the fundamental skills of modelling and setting up experiments. At the same time it will improve the fundamental understanding of the phenomena since simplifications and limitations of the theoretical background become obvious when the results are critically evaluated in different states of the development. Furthermore, the focus will be on a number of fundamental principles in the subject and in this way help the students to a better understanding of most of the acoustical applications in "reallife".