Abstract:

Higher university education should offer young people a twofold objective: firsth to fully train their critical thinking; for decades this result has been obtained through the traditional training courses of the various disciplines, it remains an objective to be pursued to face the challenges of the coming decades. At the same time the student would like to become familiar with the specific tools of the work activities to be faced at the end of the training period. The need for this dual-purpose is present principally in technical subjects in which training cannot be limited to proposing the most advanced tools (software) made available today to the world of the profession, but it is not possible not to give support for those who must quickly enter the work world. This need is even stronger for students of architecture schools where technical skills are flanked by humanistic studies. One hypothesis could be to carry on the courses of a more applicative nature with the use of the tools most used today in the various fields, leaving the development of the critical spirit to the historical and generally humanistic courses, but we know that in a few years the tools proposed will be overtaken by ever faster developments. Providing only theory and teaching a general approach does not allow it to be spent in the work world. Can we do something different? We want to propose an approach in which the student has a professional tool at his disposal and can use it, not as a purpose, but only as a self-control tool. The beam theory course can propose the classical methods of solution (graphic or analytical), and at the same time show how to verify the results through automatic tools: spreadsheets such as Excel, symbolic mathematical analysis software such as Mathematica, or even professional finite element (FEM) programs for the analysis of beam systems. In this way, the student who learns to deal the problem with traditional methodologies can be confident in his results through the software, develop more solutions, including numerical ones, and understand the limits of the software themselves by discovering errors (for example, signs) than in the graphic procedure they are self-correcting. Finally, thanks to the speed of nowadays programs, it is possible to introduce optimization criteria, as well as the verification of the hypotheses underlying the calculation model.

Keywords:

Critical Thinking, Software, Beam Theory.