Saylor.org's ME101 on iTunes UDistill mechanical engineering enough and you’ll end up with mathematics and physics (and we won’t wade into the argument of which one of those two is more elemental). Look closely, and you’ll find you’ve also wound up with a good bit of common sense. Engineering is whole-heartedly about real-world application and creative problem-solving, making it a discipline that almost anyone should be able to get behind (even we history majors).

Our first course in the ME area of study sequence, ME101: Introduction to Mechanical Engineering has now joined the ranks of our courses on iTunes U. You’ll pick up some basic principles, start working with the open source software Scilab, and apply what you know in a small design project. We’d love for you to try it out, and let us know what you think!

ME101 joins 35 other courses on the Saylor Foundation channel at  iTunes U, including three other ME courses: Mechanics I, Measurement and Experimentation, and Numerical Methods. ME101 remains, of course, one of the 280 courses available on our main site at Saylor.org.

Like all of our iTunes U courses, this one is much better (and more fully-featured) when viewed on an iOS device rather than on a personal computer, but you can always dive into the ‘standard’ version here at Saylor.org, and dig into 279 other free courses besides.