Literature review…
One of the key drivers of this project was the on-going observation by the Institution of Structural Engineers (IStructE) and industry that the quality of graduates has been on the constant decline for the past 40 years or so; specifically the ability for graduates to understand structural behaviour. This is notable in articles, publications, and reports published by the professional bodies, starting with the highly graphical tests of (Brohn & Cowan, 1977a, 1977b) who concluded that graduates “…did not have a sound understanding of structural behaviour.” This criticism has continued to be banded about within the structural engineering circles since this report with concerning regularity. One of the key skills of a structural engineer is to identify the difference between a structure and a mechanism, and this skill was shown to be lacking by modern graduates through the tests of graduates undertaken by (Morreau, 1990).
Indeed during his time as President of the IStructE Graeme Owens dedicated (and still does) a considerable amount of time and effort to addressing these inadequacies in the teaching of structural behaviour (Owens, 2011). Indeed (Owens, 2010) notes that “At worst, when tested on a qualitative understanding of structural behaviour, many students with good degrees from universities with strong reputation score zero!”
This is symbolised most recently by the paper competition arranged by Owens to identify best teaching practices from the UK universities. Equally (Cook, 2011) correctly identifies that for a structural engineer to be successful they must have a core understanding of structural behaviour. One could perhaps be forgiven for believing this to be a problem solely constrained to the UK educational system, but (Aparicio & Ruiz-Teran, 2007) also notes that this is a crisis affecting the industry far beyond just the UK and indeed could potentially expand to other portions of Western society.
Methods of teaching?
Traditional methods of teaching structural analysis are highly numerical, with little or no consideration given to the qualitative aspects of the structure (Brohn & Cowan, 1977a). Modern software packages are incredibly powerful and the engineering design has become less about the analysis (MacLeod, 1995) and more about the understanding of the results being presented, but this can only happen when a strong understanding of structural behaviour is present in the students.
It is worth noting that typically structural engineering analysis is taken as a quantitive process, with the students determining numerical values to a series of problems, one of the recommendations of (Brohn & Cowan, 1977a) report and from (Curtin, 1991) was that equal measure should also be given to qualitative analysis: this was one of the reasons for the creation of my real time physics models as they allow the student to experience behaviour in its truest representation. One of the challenges facing lecturers when trying to develop assistive learning technologies is that the nature of the technology changes quickly (Law, 2011) and the technology is difficult to describe in a meaningful manner due to it frequently becoming obsolete in a short period of time.
Puzzles?
Puzzles are widely used in the teaching and learning of STEM subjects, most typically Mathematics (Levitin & Levitin, 2011) where they are used to improve logic skills. Recent years have seen a development and expansion of these puzzles into the broader STEM disciplines (Badger, Sangwin, Ventura-Medina, & Thomas, 2012) to allow specific puzzles to be tailored into subject specific areas. The success of a puzzle is largely dependent on having four defining qualities (Michalewicz & Michalewicz, 2008):
1.) Generality:
Educational puzzles should explain some universal mathematical problem.
2.) Simplicity:
Education puzzles should be easy to state and remember, if puzzles are easy to remember then this can increase the chance that the solution too will be remembered in the future.
3.) Eureka factor:
Puzzles should by their very nature be puzzling, and consequently frustrating to a degree. The result should be interesting as sometimes it may feel counter-intuitive but should ultimately end with a Eureka! moment.
4.) Entertainment factor:
For a puzzle to be effective it should be entertaining, students may lose interest if puzzles are not fun!
Essentially the nature of my chosen intervention requires the use of a real time physics simulation of various different structures, initially to explore the behaviour, then as the student’s confidence grows to identify and solve a puzzle. It could be argued that the use of puzzles has several similarities to Problem Based Learning (Dym, Agogino, Frey, & Leifer, 2005) but it also has several distinct differences, in this instance for example the puzzle is a closed solution and does not necessarily require the user to acquire new information in order to solve the problem. Also the student can work in isolation or as a group for my puzzles in an informal playful manner (Hodkinson, Colley, & Malcolm, 2003), but the advantages of group working are primarily for benefits through peer to peer reflection (Atkins & Murphy, 1993).
Simulations.
Civil Engineering courses have historically used simulations (Cullingford, Mawdesley, & Davies, 1979) and visualisation techniques (Bagchi, 2011; Townsend & Wood, 1978) in a wide variety of settings from blended learning (Wall & Ahmed, 2008), to business games (Pasin & Giroux, 2011), through to virtual environment simulations (Freitas & Neumann, 2009). One of the key elements of these types of simulations is that they model something realistically, but in a simplified manner (Kolfschoten, Frantzeskaki, Haan, & Verbraeck, 2008) to provide summative feedback (Oraifige, Heesom, & Felton, 2009) as they respond to various inputs and stimulus provided by students using digital technologies (JISC, 2010) to help encourage their learning through accumulation of experience (Kolb, 1984; Moon, 2004).
The assessment of pedagogical benefit of games (Kebritchi & Hirumi, 2008) and puzzles has been frequently considered within STEM projects, but through combining these with a formal reflective process (Mawdesley, Long, Al-jibouri, & Scott, 2011) the benefits can be increased. Indeed traditional teaching material is static, and through the introduction of dynamic content (Ploetzner, Lippitsch, Galmbacher, Heuer, & Scherrer, 2009) the behaviour of the structures should be better visualised by the students, particularly the removal of language barriers (Phipps, Sutherland, & Seale, 2002) break the simulations down to their simplest component: their behaviour.
It is hoped that by getting the students engaged within the puzzle environment that they may eventually feel comfortable enough to develop their own puzzles to test each other with, this level of collaboration (Triantafyllakos, Palaigeorgiou, & Tsoukalas, 2011) should lead to better reflections (Moon, 2001) on how they feel they learn structural behaviour and to identify tricky areas to test their puzzles with.
When using real time physics if a mistake is made then the puzzles will collapse in real time, one point to note is that (Huei-Tse, 2012) identified in large user games, specifically MMORPG’s that students were more actively engaged in ‘battles’ rather than problem solving areas. This destructive type of behaviour could perhaps be capitalised on within the puzzles to get the students to identify the quickest way to make a structure fail through the removal of the fewest elements. Indeed if a community could be constructed which required the engagement of the players in a multiplayer environment this could help create better engagement with the students and a more positive outlook to gaming as a valid method of learning (Hainey, Connolly, Stansfield, & Boyle, 2011) and increase social interaction as the community grows.
Even for non-engineers, watching the real time collapse of the structures can be seen to be quite fun, particularly as some of the Physion models can fail in quite spectacular fashion. The benefits of fun should not be overlooked when teaching and learning. Ebner (2007) found that the introduction of simulations into Civil Engineering lectures the outputs from the students improved and there was a distinct increase in ‘joy’ based on (Nielsen, 2002).
During a recent essay competition (Collins & Davies, 2009) one of the things noted by engineering students as to what made a good engineering lecturer was the use of real examples, indeed good teaching as described by (Ramsden, 2003) also notes that making the “material being taught stimulating and interesting” is a key contributor to good practice in teaching and learning, both of these positive qualities can be seen in the use of real time physics and the puzzles.
Summary.
From this literature review it is clear that for modern graduates understanding structural behaviour is a problem within the industry that must be addressed by the universities. One method worth considering is the integration of structural simulations that are fun and engaging in a real time physics environment, particularly when combined with the use of puzzles both created by the lecturers and also by other students. The development of such a resource will be the primary focus of my ALT teaching intervention.
References:
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