To Lecturers

We hope the website provides useful material to supplement the teaching of structural concepts. The photos and/or contents in the website can be downloaded for teaching.

It is hoped that students learn effectively and actively and this, in part, requires the provision of appropriate activities and/or stimulators. This book and the website can be used for such a purpose. We have asked our third-year undergraduate students to read all the contents of the website relating to Statics and assigned them individual coursework entitled 'enhancing the understanding of structural concepts' for which they needed either to design a physical model to show one structural concept or to identify a practical example where one structural concept was creatively used. This coursework has been received enthusiastically and the returns have been excellent and collected to form a booklet. This was then distributed to all students in the class to form a student source of learning, enabling them to learn from each other rather than from lecturers and textbooks. Some examples provided by the students have been added to the website.

We have developed the website as a student centered learning resource in conjunction with the use of Blackboard. This work was funded by the Engineering Subject Centre, the Higher Education Academy. The article on enhancing the learning of structural concepts using the website can be found at: http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/assets/documents/subjects/engineering/case-study-enahncing-learning-of-structural-concepts.pdf