Abstract:

The aim of this article is to highlight the teaching capabilities that a tool developed for smartphones and the cloud has in building structures analysis.
Today the society is in constant contact with new technologies. Students have developed a great capacity for interaction with mobile technologies, especially visually. Therefore, we can use these skills to teach a subject or a few concepts, physical in our case.

The matrix analysis of structures is very complex and laborious because their terms are matrices that can have a large size. But now any Smartphone is capable of handling these operations with agility.

The presented application is developed on the platform Mathstud.io, of symbolic math, and allows its use in the cloud through a web page, in the iOS system of Apple and in Android. In this way, students can access the application anywhere, anytime.

This application uses the matrix method to calculate structures. It consists of a highly interactive application with which the students can see diagrams of the structure, its deformed configuration and the symbolic level equations that govern it. This immediacy in operations allows them to test the structures and learning through play, and gradually understand one of the most complex concepts of structural analysis, boundary conditions, both for structure and element.

This teaching experience is ongoing, but notes that the student collects the concepts in a very natural and smooth way. The learning curve would otherwise be very stepped for this complex subject.

Keywords:

Interactive learning, smartphone, structural matrix analysis, learning curve, teaching experience.