Abstract:

We have detected a great gap between teaching of structural mechanics and the real world applications related with this subject. The European Higher Education Area requires a higher proportion of practical content in courses, so that students can develop skills to solve real problems in the development of their professional practice. Therefore, we have the challenge of developing new laboratory practices to reduce the gap between theoretical contents of the classes and the aforementioned real world applications.

When we faced with this problem, we realized that usual commercial equipments for educational laboratories are quite limited in flexibility and are often quite expensive. In this work we show how we have implemented the practices for a structural mechanics course in the second year of civil engineering studies using open hardware solutions. For this purpose we built our own devices and involved students from different courses and specialties, including undergraduate researchers in the development of the different mechanical and electronic components. The main aim of the present work has been the creation of a self-teaching experience for students, where they can freely build the models, interact with the sensors and check the correlation between the theoretical models and the practical results.

Keywords:

EHEA (European Higher Education Area), Open Hardware, Laboratories Practices.