Free online courseClassical Mechanics

Course Description

Strengthen your core mechanical reasoning and learn to turn real-world motion into clear, solvable models. This free online course in Classical Mechanics develops the professional skill of analyzing how objects move and why they move that way, using the same framework that underpins mechanical and industrial basics—from machines and transport to robotics, tooling and product design. Instead of memorizing formulas, you build intuition for physical systems and gain a repeatable method to set up problems, choose assumptions, and reach results you can trust.

You start with the language of mechanics: vectors, coordinate systems and representations that let you describe position, velocity and acceleration in one and two dimensions. From there, you connect kinematics to dynamics by applying Newton’s laws, learning how to select reference frames, interpret interactions between bodies, and translate forces into equations of motion. Along the way you practice drawing and reasoning with free-body diagrams so that each term in an equation has a physical meaning rather than being a symbol to copy.

As the course progresses, you develop fluency with gravity, friction, tension, springs and resistive forces, and you see how constraints from ropes, pulleys and connected bodies shape what a system can do. You then expand into circular motion and rotation, building the bridge from translation to rigid-body dynamics with torque, angular velocity, angular momentum and moment of inertia. Energy methods add a second powerful lens: work, power, conservative and non-conservative forces, potential energy and mechanical energy conservation become tools for solving problems efficiently when force-based approaches get messy.

Momentum and impulse bring yet another perspective, helping you analyze collisions, recoil and systems of particles, and reinforcing the habit of selecting the right conservation principle for the situation. By working through guided examples and targeted exercises, you’ll learn to validate units, check limiting cases, and interpret answers in context—skills that translate directly into engineering workflows, technical interviews, and advanced study in physics or mechanical engineering.