To this day, the 1981 skywalk collapse in the Kansas City Hyatt Regency resulted in the worst loss of life from a structural engineering mistake in United States history. While many important engineering lessons can be drawn from this disaster, it is just as important to recognize the broader lessons learned in the design and construction process as a whole that can be successfully brought into the classroom. Numerous organizations have undertaken the task of envisioning how engineering education can meet the demands of the future. ABET's baccalaureate degree accreditation criteria, ASCE's Body of Knowledge and Body of Knowledge 2 as well as the National Academy of Engineering have documented the need to change engineering education from its historical focus on technical content knowledge to include greater emphasis on professional issues and to integrate engineering practice into education. To this end teaching methods such as project based learning, active learning and the use of case studies are being explored to address these broader learning outcomes while actively engaging students. Because of the attraction students have in extraordinary events, the Hyatt disaster provides an ideal backdrop to introduce many of the professional issues needed to broaden the undergraduates' learning experience. This paper discusses the use of the Hyatt Regency skywalk collapse in design coursework with specific application to third and fourth year civil and architectural engineering student learning. Besides the traditional concepts of load flow analysis and member design, broader concepts relating to professional roles and responsibilities, design team interplay, the design process, the construction process and professional practice ethics are emphasized.
Numerous organizations have undertaken the task of envisioning the education required to meet the engineering demands of the future. The ABET study EC2000, ASCE's Civil Engineering Body of Knowledge and Body of Knowledge 2 and the National Academy of Engineering have documented the need to change engineering education from its historical focus on technical content knowledge to include greater emphasis on professional issues and to integrate engineering practice into education. To this end teaching methods such as project-based learning, and the use of case studies are being explored to address these broader learning outcomes. Case studies in particular facilitate telling the stories of professional practice. This paper discusses the use of engineering case studies in design coursework with specific application to third year architectural engineering student learning. Introduction, application and discussion of several case studies are presented in the context of teaching building structural design. Along with the technical execution of system and member selection, computer analyzes and structural detailing that occur in these courses, broader concepts relating to professional roles and responsibilities, design team interplay, the design process, the construction process and professional practice ethics are investigated. The advantages of this altered approach to teaching engineering design are discussed.
The authors taught Timber Structural Systems (an engineering course for architecture and construction management students) online during the summer of 2002. While ofjeering an engineering course online is not a new concept, ojjering an engineering course that relies on model building and experimentation to non-engineering majors posed many c hnllenges but also resulted in many rewards. Both authors had taught the course previously in a traditional face-lo-joce classroom setting but neither had ever taught an online course. The lessons learnedfrom this experience, recommendations for faculty teoching similar courses online, andfuture directions that will be taken by the authors are presented in this paper.
This study focused on the application of engineering notebooks to support student learning of engineering design practices as well as content learning of math and science concepts applied during an engineering design challenge. A case study approach was used to analyze student teams in four high school physics classes tasked with designing Rube Goldberg Machines following a physics unit on forces, motion and energy. Teams were required to document their design and construction processes in an electronic engineering notebook. The notebooks were examined for evidence of student understanding and communication of the engineering design process, reflective learning, and kinematic principles as well as the level of participation of each individual in the team. Integrating engineering into math and science courses is new to many inservice teachers and research has documented that science teacher efforts focus more on engineering practices such as teamwork and communication rather than the application of the math and science concepts that are important to engineering problem solving. The research objective was to identify tools and practices which would aid K12 teachers in effectively incorporating engineering into curricula in an integrated manner.
Obispo (Cal Poly) where he teaches courses on the analysis and design of structural systems including laboratory courses.
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