Technologies for Teaching Design in Engineering and Architecture

Kirk Martini, Architecture

1995 TTI Fellow

Project website: http://urban.arch.virginia.edu/~km6e/arch324/

Mr. Martini's project integrates teaching technologies into a newly created course on Structural Design in the Department of Architecture, one which will be required for all undergraduate and most graduate Architecture students. He plans to use computers to help address the lack of interactive visual material, a serious flaw in the design curriculum. The ultimate goal of structural design-or any architectural or engineering design-is to produce tangible physical objects. Mr. Martini is convinced that structural designers need images-and lots of them-of structures in situ and under construction, for appropriate learning to take place, and he plans to provide those images solely in digital form. Digital media have significant advantages over the traditional media of slides and photographs: they can be easily annotated; they suffer minimal degradation over time and with use; they are easily organized, and they can be widely distributed over computer networks, allowing students access to essential material outside the class. Mr. Martini is planning on a close integration of images into course content and pedagogy. The project will make images used in lectures available over the World Wide Web, with accompanying commentary as hypertext documents, thus giving students unlimited access to the essential content of the course. Through this thorough review of the images and their meaning in structural design, Mr. Martini hopes to motivate the students to explore their significance in greater depth.An important feature of Mr. Martini's project is interactive analysis. Structural behavior-the nature of a given structure's response to stimuli-is a critical component of the curriculum. There are now available on the market several structural analysis programs, and Mr. Martini's project will integrate these programs into his hypertextual classroom presentations to illustrate a variety of structural concepts. Responding to a perceived need in his field to synthesize design and technical issues, Mr. Martini also plans to use the computer as a tool to investigate the interaction of creativity with scientific rigor. With the World Wide Web as his delivery platform, the results of his inquiry will be available to his students wherever and whenever they want to view the material. In addition to their many advantages in teaching, digital images and the World Wide Web offer many potential advantages in engineering practice and research. Because the effective use of these technologies is one of Mr. Martini's primary research interests, his TTI project creates a strong symbiosis between his teaching and research. In a letter recently published in Inside UVa, Mr. Martini described attitudes he developed about teaching and research while he was a Lilly Teaching Fellow: "When teaching is stimulation rather than irritation, it can be a font of ideas instead of a drain on time....Creating that situation is not easy; it requires carefully crafted technique." His project seeks to create that stimulation for both teacher and student.

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