Statics and free-body diagrams, SI and Imperial units, force, moment, and torque, work, power, and energy, and stress, strain, and material behavior — the on-ramp fluency every later module in this program assumes you already have.
Most mechanical training jumps straight to component tables and design formulas. This module deliberately starts one level up: what a free-body diagram actually captures and why skipping one is where most calculation errors originate, where mass, weight, and force genuinely diverge between SI and Imperial units, and why stress and strain — not raw force and deformation — are the numbers engineers actually compare against material properties.
By the end of this module you should be able to explain, from first principles, why a part is designed against its yield strength rather than its ultimate tensile strength — a distinction Module 2's material comparisons and Module 10's design calculations both build on without re-deriving it.