Information Technologies in Structural Engineering: A paperless course

Abstract

This paper presents the structure of an undergraduate course entitled "Programming Techniques and use of specialised software for Structural Engineering" which is offered to the 5 th year students of the Civil Engineering Department of Aristotle University Thessaloniki in Greece. The aim of this course is to demonstrate the use of new Information Technologies in the field of Structural Engineering and to teach modern programming and finite element simulation techniques that the students can in turn apply in both research and everyday design. Apart from demonstrating the programming and simulation techniques and tools currently available, the course focuses on the physical interpretation of structural engineering problems as they are discussed in class, in a way that the students become familiar with the concept of computational tools without losing perspective from the engineering problem studied. For this purpose, a wide variety of structural engineering problems are studied in class, involving problem solving related to structural statics and dynamics, earthquake engineering, design of reinforced concrete and steel structures as well as data and information management. The main novelty of the course is that it is taught and examined solely in the computer laboratory ensuring that each student can accomplish the prescribed hands-on exercises on a dedicated computer, strictly on a 1:1 student over hardware ratio. Significant effort has been put so that modern educational techniques and tools are utilised in order to offer the course in an essentially paperless mode. This involves electronic educational material, student information in real time and exams given electronically through an ad-hoc developed, personalised, electronic system. The feedback received from the students, also in the form of an automatically processed web-based questionnaire, reveals that the educational digital media used and the structure of the course itself, meet the main course objective to familiarize the students with modern technologies without losing focus to the physical engineering problem studied.