Following this earlier post, our full paper on undergraduate engineers use of video resources is now published in the European Journal of Engineering Education. The lucky first 50 people to click below can see it for free!
http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/HeXyrcjxJ2qJcuMDFpCb/full
After that you will need to login via an institution, pay, or use the pre-print version.
My Christmas competition this year and how to enter is described in detail here. Prize is a copy of the excellent Structural Basis of Architecture by Eggen and Sandaker. The basic question is: What is the bending moment at the base of this column?
Today I presented at the IStructE annual Academics Conference. I was talking about the development and thinking behind the Structures 1 course I deliver at Manchester University. These are my slides and paper.
Other good speakers included Rhys Morgan of the RAENG who gave some interesting statistics on student numbers and destinations, broken down by subject, gender and ethnicity. My former colleague Tim Stratford also spoke about teaching creativity and design at the University of Edinburgh, work that I was involved with the early stages of. Tim deservedly won the annual IStructE Excellence in Higher Education Prize this year.
Like most materials, when you heat a piece of concrete, it expands. Unlike most materials, when you heat a piece of concrete with a load on it, it expands less, or not at all, or it may even contract, depending on how big the load is – diagram below. This unusual behaviour goes by a number of names such transient thermal strain, transient thermal creep, or load-induced thermal strain (LITS). Here I will use LITS.
LITS – in simple terms. Concrete thermal expansion is stress dependent.
My interest in LITS began about eight years ago when then PhD student, Angus Law, started investigating its role in concrete-framed structures under fire. Angus implemented a LITS model in Abaqus and showed that LITS can affect the behaviour of certain types of structural element substantially. He also demonstrated the importance of correctly representing the multi-axial behaviour of LITS.
More recently two more PhD students working with me have started looking at LITS from very different angles: Continue reading
I have just finished teaching Structures 1 to first year Civil and Aerospace engineers. This unit covers a lot of basic material like bending moment and shear force diagrams. In the detail of all this it is easy to lose sight of the bigger picture of why these topics are interesting and useful. So, for the coursework element of the unit, I set an open-ended brief asking students to research any structure (widely interpreted) of their choice, and explore it in a conceptual way. I also gave marks for creativity in communicating the findings. After last year’s investigation of the structure known as “Martin Gillie“, this year’s submissions are no less imaginative. Continue reading
Over the summer I have been a running project looking at how students use a variety of “rich-media”, such as key-concept videos and tutorial solution videos. This sort of material is being used more and more widely in education – for example here at Manchester University lectures are available as podcasts and I use my YouTube channel in teaching – yet there is surprisingly little known about how students use rich-media or what formats and styles are most beneficial educationally. In the project we (me, Ranim Dahli, Fiona Saunders and Andy Gibson) examined how students on first year technical courses used media-rich material. This is the biggest study to date of such usage and also one of the first where the class were all young enough to have used rich-media throughout their earlier education. The full findings of the project will be available shortly in a journal paper and also presented internally and externally to the University, however, the summarised results and conclusions are: Continue reading
Structural engineering is often seen as solely reams of calculations and consequently the profession and engineering degrees are viewed as dull. To help counter this (false) perception, I have been working with two undergraduates, Divij and Essam, this summer to develop large, public and interactive “sculptures” to communicate structural concepts in a natural and engaging manner.
Discussing ideas at BuroHappold’s Manchester offices (thanks to visiting professor Mei Ren for organising this meeting).
