Abstract:

The difficulties of teaching and learning through abstract concepts in subjects that have a strong physical component, together with the emergence of new transversal skills (group work, leadership capacity, creativity, sustainability, etc.), sometimes difficult to implement and evaluate, highlight the need of new methodologies in the classroom. These methods should be based in experiential learning and involve the active participation of the students, in order to allow them to learn rehearsing.

The design, calculation and construction of structures require knowledge of very diverse fields: materials, mechanical properties, structural design, construction, etc. This multiplicity of points of view makes difficult their integration into a single subject. On the other hand, learning them independently hinders their global understanding by the student. The possibility of gathering this multiplicity of points of view in a single experience, however limited, manages to confront the student with the complexity of the constructive fact from a holistic approach.

Previous experiences of students' elaboration of structural models at scale, which have subsequently undergone resistance tests in a competitive challenge among student teams, have proven to be helpful in the development of various aspects of learning. Its degree of utility is difficult to quantify given that these activities are included in the curriculum on a voluntary basis, but it has been a proven fact both by teachers and students that the achievement and, therefore, the average grade of students who have carried out these activities has been higher to that of those who have not done them. Whether this greater use may be due to a greater prior interest of the students or that it was the activity that triggered this greater interest is a fact that will have to be checked in the future, given the positive experience.

The present work aims at involving the student in an experience learning process based on the application of the acquired theoretical knowledge, not only in the specific subjects of structures, but also in the construction of a structural prototype fitting given rules and parameters. The model must be made with minimum fixed dimensions, and its parts must be obtained by laser cutting from a CAD design, using a maximum number of wood fibre boards, for all teams. Subsequently, on a given date the presented models are examined and subjected to load tests in a competition environment between teams of different subjects and schools. For those accepted models, the parameter that determines their effectiveness is the ratio between load supported and weight.

As can be deduced from the above, students must combine not only strictly structural knowledge, but others such as computer-aided design, or the concept of compliance with fixed norms. Therefore, in the future, it could be studied to extend the participation to work teams formed by students of different subjects.

A first pilot test, with a reduced number of teams formed voluntarily, has been carried out by conducting a competition of structural models among students of the the Schools of Civil and Building Engineering of the UPM. This has allowed the exchange of experiences among students of subjects related to the construction and analysis of structures. The future goal is to extend this experience to a greater number of participants and perform a quantitative verification of its impact on the learning process.

Keywords:

STEM experiences, learning by experience, structural models, multidisciplinar challenges.