Abstract:

Most of the high school and even college students, including those registered in technical degrees as Engineering or Architecture, ask for a recipe or “prototype” exercise as example to solve others. They look for repeating a process instead of thinking and understanding the reasons behind that process.

Life is more than applying a recipe. Architects and Engineers should learn how to solve problems: analyze the information given, understand the rules under each problem, consider different possibilities, make decisions, test them in advance, apply them and check if the resultant effect is the expected one.

As Mathematics and Structural Analysis lecturers in the degree in Architecture at San Pablo CEU University, we have realized that students engagement improves significantly if they find the relationship between the courses content and real life problems. Moreover, competition triggers their desire to win and their commitment with any proposed activity.

With those ingredients in mind, we have designed the Structural Battles, an active and experiential way of learning in which students work in teams with the aim of making a structural system fail.

The Structural Battles have been implemented in different levels of the degree for more than five years. It all started with the Trusses Battle and Architecture students in their second year: after an introductory class where the main concepts of tension, compression, forces equilibrium and statically determinacy are explained, the group is divided in two teams. The aim of one of the teams is to transform the truss into a mechanism; the other team should prevent that to happen. Both teams are provided with several cards to apply to the structural system: add or remove a bar, add or remove a boundary, a load, change a dimension… Students should choose which cards to apply to the system. Once the decisions are made, with the aid of a software, we check the consequences of the cards applied. Students learn from experience. The second round is always better than the first; and in the third one the students decisions reveal they have understood the truss behavior.

Due to the activity success, we have adapted it both to bachelor students interested in STEM degrees and to more mature students, changing the structural model to analyze.

In this communication we will share our experience: how the activity was designed, its rules, how it has evolved and adapted to different subjects, and how its seeds might grow in other fields with different content but the same aim: make the students work for understanding concepts instead of learning by heart step by step methods.

Keywords:

Truss Battles, Frame Battles, Gamification, STEM, Structural Analysis.