Abstract:

I am both a practicing structural engineer and a professor teaching Structures to architecture students for more than 30 years. During my many years of practice, I worked with many architects and found that an understanding of a structural system is very beneficial to the architect. The better this understanding, the more successful the project will become - with a much better chance to be completed on time and within the budget. My goal is to impress the importance of Structures on my architecture students. I understand that I will not be able to “reach” every student, but I am working on doing my best to improve my odds.

When I started teaching many years ago, there were significantly higher math requirements needed to pass the structural portion of the architecture registration exam than there are today.

My architecture students rarely appeared to have the same interest in mathematical subjects as engineers. And, as the registration exam requirements changed, I began experimenting with the organization of topics and type of assessment tools. I also began to reduce the amount a math covered and increase the emphasis on intuition, logic, and common sense.

Recognizing that architecture students were more accustomed to a studio environment than to the lecture, I started teaching Structures as a simulated studio class - assigning individual or team projects and presenting structural topics relevant to these projects. Every time I made small adjustments, I sought student input and feedback.

As I am the only professor teaching Structures in our program, I have the luxury (and responsibility) of choosing which approaches to test. I have the opportunity to make changes quickly test them over two to three years to assess the results and students’ acceptance.

This past spring semester, because of the pandemic I had to transition from a face-to-face format to remote delivery with only a few days to implement this change. Fortunately, my students were very supportive of our transition to an on-line format. I have been informed that Structures will again be taught remotely this fall semester.

I am planning on several significant changes to my courses, recognizing that it is unclear whether classes in the spring will be taught face-to-face or remotely. With this in mind, I will be designing my courses to be both flexible and available to be delivered with the same level of quality whether in person or remotely.

I believe that my experiences would be helpful to others teaching Structures in architecture or other design programs. These approaches and my experiences using them could assist instructors looking to better engage their students when delivering courses that students may consider “peripheral” to their concentrations.

My efforts continue. This coming year I plan on adding a Finite Elements Structural software package for my students. I also will be using a modeling package that will allow me to build a prototype of a structure, and my students will be able to test its behavior using the software package.

This paper describes several of my course layouts, experiences teaching them, benefits and difficulties, students’ responses and input, and results of a recent accreditation visit that our program just went through.

Keywords:

Teaching Structures, from face-to-face to remote learning, curriculum priorities, students’ participation.