Teaching in Sports Biomechanics at TU Darmstadt

We offer several teaching courses in sports biomechanics. Our teaching repertoire ranges from introductory lectures on biomechanis and research methods to research-projects that are closely related to our current scientific research. International students are welcome to all courses.

In the following we briefly introduce our teaching activities. As the basis for teaching, a wiki platform has been set. Based on the platform, students can create teaching modules with respect to a topic which is corresponding to their field of interests.

In this lecture we follow the device: “learning through programming”. We present the basic of biomechanics, this means students learn about the topics and concepts, basic ideas, models in motion/motor function and locomotion-learning.
Within these fields, we aim to associate the imparting of basic knowledge with basic programming skills (Matlab and GeoGebra). Students uses these softwares to do exercices, which are related to the current topics and support the consolidation of the current topics from the lectures.
There are manifold advantages of this approach:

• the sofware can be used to illustrate biomechanical relationships
• students can either learn about biomechanics through programming or programming through biomechanics
• students learn about software they will potentially need for analysing experimental data or for building simulation models.

The concept of this pro-seminar is quite versatile, as we want to introduce different aspects of a scientific daily-life to our students. The challenge today is, to learn to deal with:

• construtive feedback (how to give and deal with)
• scientific-working (e.g. citing, literature-research)
• project-management (different roles)
• information society (deal with new media)
• complex coherences (in biomechanis).

Our approach is to open the content of seminar to the public via an wiki (see Lauflabor-WIKI). By this, we offer students a platform where they have access to edited knowledge, which saves time for literature-research. And we raise students awareness to work carefully when creating a wiki-entry and article, respecitvely.
We want to integrate students interests and experiences. Furthermore we'd like to support the creativity of the students and help them to shape their profile by learning to deal with feedback and learn basics of project- and time-management.

This concepts was rewarded with the e-Teaching Award 2013 of the TU Darmstadt.

Organization of the course

To improve the effectivity of the course, we implemented a flip-the-classromm concept. Here students acquire knowlegde from online wiki-modues (Lauflabor-WIKI) as preparation for the courses. In each course the gained knowledge gets verified via a short questionnaire. Immediately after filling the questions, students swap their form with a partner to check their answers and explain and discuss, respecitvely the correct answer. If none of them is able to give the correct answer, this question will be collected by the lecturer and discussed in the plenum afterwards.
This supports interaction between students and detects knowledge-gaps, which will be filled in a general discussion, lead by the lectures.

In addition students (small groups up to 4 people) create their own wiki-entry on a topic of their choice. These entries directly enter the pro-seminar as relevant contents (see above). There are different roles wihtin each group: 1 speaker, who provides communication between the group and the lecturers and up to 3 reviewers, who review the other groups wiki-entries.

Here we carry on the training of our students in methodology of scientific working.
In small groups (3 to 5), students pass all steps of a scientific process to generate a knowledge acquisition, that ends in a publication.
This includes:

• define a research question
• build up hypotheses
• study-design (planning) and -realization (data-collection)
• computer-based data-analysis
• presentation of results and discussion
• writing a manuscript (that could be a paper)
• review process

At the end, the students will gained experiences that will help them in their further studies or future work.

In this seminar, students learn about measurement techniques in movement science. These techniques comprise

• kinematic measurements (e.g. joint and segment positions and orientations)
• kinetic measurements (e.g. ground reaction forces, joint torques)
• muscle activity measurements (e.g. surface EMG)
• estimation of metabolic costs (e.g. oxygen consumption measurement)

For each measurement technique, first the theoretical background is provided. Afterwards students learn to use the system in a simple measurement task and purchase first experiences in data-processing and -analysis.

From basics of human science to practical applications

This teaching project aims at bringing students into contact with interdisciplinary methods of measuring and processing human movement data as well as the technical implementation of different locomotion tasks (e.g., robotics or prosthetics). The modules are relevant for a variety of students, but especially for students from sport science, psychology, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering or computer science.

This seminar is part of the Master studies in Sports Science. Here student get involved in current research projects. Based on an expert interview they learn about key challenges and insights gained in the selected research area. Together with the experts the define their own focused research goal which complements their study. At the end of the seminar student summarize their insights in a public wiki document.

This seminar started in the summer semester 2014. Please finde more information on our IFS Teaching Wiki (in German).

Since 2013, this seminar is organized as a joined seminar on “Motions in Man and Machines” in cooperation with other faculties at TU Darmstadt and other research facilities.

In 2014 this seminar is held in cooperation with:

• Human Movement Simulation Lab at the University of Stuttgart
• High Perfomance Humanoid Technologies Lab at the Karsruhe Institute of Technology
• Intelligent Autonomous Systems Lab at TU Darmstadt

Please find more info on the IFS Teaching Wiki.

• Center for Interdisciplinary Biological Inspiration in Education and Research (CiBER) at UC Berkeley
• Arizona State University, KIN 335 Biomechanics