A METHODOLOGICAL APPROACH BASED ON COOPERATIVE AUTONOMOUS LEARNING IN THE THEORY OF STRUCTURES SUBJECT

While concepts such as structural stability, buckling or bracing are key to understand structural behaviour, it must be said they are also hard for students to assimilate. This situation is reflected both in the bad marks students obtain over the years and in the surveys administered to them. Owing to this, it has been devised a methodological approach based on cooperative autonomous learning with a view to facilitating students’ comprehension of the concepts above, regarding both flat and three-dimensional structures. With this objective, they are provided with the necessary tools to promote an autonomous learning and group cooperative learning when they carry out group works in the classroom. These tools consist, on the one hand, on scaled models used to explain the basic concepts in the classroom and besides, on free software which is used to perform structural analytic and numeric analysis, both flat and three-dimensional structures. The results of the employed methodology have been valued by means of some surveys completed by the students. These have shown that this initiative has far exceeded the initial expectations and has motivated the students in the use of these tools within other subjects of the Mechanical Engineering Degree. In addition to this, this methodology has been valuated very positively by the students.