Seeking Ideas for Impactful Structural Engineering Class Assignments

[PYDC402040]

Hello,
I teach upper-level structural engineering classes. I am looking for impactful (and also reasonable for students) assignments, preferably with easy to digest plan sets.

When you think back to your undergraduate days, were there any projects, case studies or HW assignments that were particularly useful?

More specifically, I currently have a class that is Design for Natural Hazards - basically load development using ASCE 7-22. If there was a gap you wish someone had covered in Wind, Snow, Seismic or Live Load Patterning, using the ASCE 7-22 in general, or if you had an assignment that helped ease the school to work transition, I'd love to hear about it. I'm about to introduce them to Mathcad and have them build a sheet for design wind pressures. But while moving on, I had to accept not having a good live load patterning type HW/mini project for them to look at.

Looking for insight and impactful assignment ideas from the practicing community.

Thank you!

 

[ANE91]

Great post. My suggestions:

1. Make them hand-calc everything. I mean everything.

2. Focus on structural behavior and not math. Buy and cut foam into beam and wall shapes, mark it with a pen, and demonstrate Euler-Bernoulli behavior vs Timoshenko behavior.

3. Have them develop factored ultimate loads for several members and connections in the various load paths of a whole metal building. Simple 1-story box with windows and a shallow gable (the slope is important) is sufficient. Incorporate some simple spans and continuous spans. Checking every load case is a must, even if it “doesn’t govern.”

4. Ask them to work out the difference between tributary areas and following-the-load methods.

5. For wind, pay special attention to uplift. For snow, pick one of the various drift configurations (like unbalanced) to be applicable. (Frankly, wind needs its own class, and earthquake needs its own 2 classes, imo.)

6. Ask what loads are to be used for deflection checks (i.e., not strength).

 

[JoshPlumSE]

So, one thing that I think is missing from a lot of structural engineering curriculum is equipment (or cladding) attachment calculations. Tilt up design also seems to be neglected. It's not sexy, but there are a lot of tilt up buildings being built these days.

 

[Tomfh]

Study a nearby small building project. The excavation. The shoring. The substructure. Etc. At the end of semester - do a presentation on it.

Our professor loved ours because the project went bad - the perimeter sheet piling wouldn’t go in all the way. Lots of finger pointing. It was very instructive as to what can happen on projects.