Heuristics are approaches engineers use for solving problems and making decisions with quick, often approximate, calculations and/or judgement calls. Such approaches have become marginalized in structural engineering education to make room for more theoretical and precise approaches. As a result, engineering students are less confident with…

Codes and standards are important tools in civil and structural engineering, but how they are applied in the workplace in comparison to how they are taught in undergraduate engineering education has been understudied. The purpose of this research is to explore the social and material contexts wherein codes are applied in a structural engineering…

Universities face the challenge of developing undergraduate structural engineering students' design judgement. This study evaluates whether introducing 'learning from failure', centralised around 'real-world' case studies, serves to facilitate the development of engineering judgement in structural design. The study identifies the use of three…

Background: Recent advances in technology and computer simulation have expanded the use of virtual manipulatives in engineering education. However, especially in disciplines in which tactile concepts (e.g., force) are included, it has been claimed that learning could be compromised by substituting physical materials with computer simulations.…

Engineering educators naturally gravitate toward visual means for communicating concepts that would otherwise be extremely difficult to convey using words and numbers alone. With the emergence of three-dimensional (3D) printing as an accessible and cost-effective technology, it is now possible to develop customized models that enable students to…

Educational approaches in structural engineering have focused on classical methods for solving problems with manual calculations through assignments, quizzes, and exams. The use of computational software to apply the learned knowledge has been ignored for decades. This paper describes an educational approach to tackle the lack of applicable…

This article responds to a call for applied linguistics and bilingualism research from a spatial repertoires perspective informed by new materialism. It focuses on the ways international faculty members carry out instructional interactions in STEM using English as an additional language. Using video data, the analysis demonstrates how visual…

For a structural engineer, effective communication and interaction with architects cannot be underestimated as a key skill to success throughout their professional career. Structural engineers and architects have to share a common language and understanding of each other in order to achieve the most desirable architectural and structural designs.…

Conventional methods of teaching structural engineering topics focus on face-to-face delivery of course materials. This study shows that using video-based e-learning in delivering an undergraduate Structural Steel Design course satisfactorily achieved most of the course learning outcomes. Video-based e-learning with animations and simulations…

This paper presents the structure of an undergraduate course entitled "programming techniques and the use of specialised software in structural engineering" which is offered to the fifth (final) year students of the Civil Engineering Department of Aristotle University Thessaloniki in Greece. The aim of this course is to demonstrate the…

Virtual Reality (VR) provides an immersive and engaging experience that facilitates the teaching and learning of abstract concepts. This paper describes the design and implementation of the VR 360° (VR360) component of the Virtual and Augmented Reality for Structures (VARS) mobile application. This study used VARS to teach basic structural systems…

This paper reports a 6-year experience teaching building information modeling (BIM) methodology in the undergraduate/graduate architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) program at the Pontificia Universidade Catolica do Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio), Brazil. This work is part of the long-term goal of developing a new BIM AEC-based curriculum…

Pedagogic approaches to TVET offer a limited range of teaching strategies which make use of experimental learning. Thus experiments were developed for teachers of structural engineering and timber processing technologies and were subject to empirical evaluation by a researcher at the Otto-von-Guericke-University Magdeburg and Kassel University.…

Background: A better understanding of departmental climate and its relationship to engineering identity is needed to diversify engineering and improve marginalized students' experiences. Purpose/Hypothesis: We investigated whether undergraduate engineering students from 16 social identity groups perceived departmental climate differently from one…

Relying on semi-structured, qualitative interviews with 13 Latino male undergraduates in engineering, this study explored students experiences and sense of belonging within a Minority Retention Program at a 4-year public university in California. Findings support extent research on the importance of structural interventions in science, technology,…