Design exhibition offers students hands-on experience

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Students in Professor Nan Hu's Structural Engineering Principles class engaged in a new, active learning experience thanks to innovative components he recently added to the course curriculum. With support from Ohio State's Teaching Enhancement Programs (OSTEP) sponsored by the University Center for the Advancement of Teaching (UCAT), the assistant professor of structural engineering encouraged his students to view structural design as art.


A traditional, lecture-based gateway course for all civil engineering students, CIVILEN 3310 involves the analysis of simple structural elements and systems. The missing piece Hu proposed to complete his OSTEP fellowship was to engage students in active learning by having them observe examples from structural design history and then fabricate actual physical models to further enhance their understanding of structural systems. “Compared to the rich history of architecture, the designs created by structural engineers are only occasionally documented,” Hu said. "It is a no-brainer for architecture students to name a few great architects, while that may not be the case for civil engineering students.”

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Nan Hu, PhD
Hu's ideas for this course were inspired by David P. Billington, a Princeton University civil engineering professor who passed away earlier this year
Prof. Billington, whom Hu met in June, 2014, taught a pair of popular introductory courses that attempted to bridge the gap between engineering and liberal arts. He is known for a series of books highlighting the concept of “structural art” and works of structural artists, including The Tower and the Bridge,  Félix Candela: Engineer, Builder, Structural Artist, and The Art of Structural Design: A Swiss Legacy. Through these books, Billington showed how professors could influence their students in the classroom and make a lasting impact in students' careers.

While at Princeton, Dr. Hu discovered a new method of teaching structural engineering through design exhibitions such as Kevin: Fazlur Khan: Structural Artist of Urban Building Forms  and Evolution of German Shells: Efficiency in FormThis type of teaching model had been implemented at several other smaller institutions like Stanford, MIT, and Dartmouth. Despite the university having larger class sizes, Hu decided to give this method a shot at Ohio State.


He added three new components to the current content of CIVILEN 3310:

  • Incorporated a “History and Legacy” section in the first four weeks of the course
  • Offered extra-credit for students who read technical papers on the topic of structural art and submitted essays discussing the documents
  • Created a design exhibition to enable a team of three students to design, analyze and build real-world buildings and bridges.

At the beginning of the semester, Hu conducted a survey that posed the question, “Is structural design an art?” It was not surprising to Hu that, among 68 students, only 13% strongly agreed that it was. 18% of students agreed while 38% of his students were neutral. After learning more history of structural design during the initial, four-week span, a second survey showed that 58% of students strongly agreed and 31% agreed that structural design was "art".

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Civil engineering students Raina Rotondo (left) and Connor Higgins (second from left) introduce their project on Millau Viaduct to classmate Cody Johnson (second from right) and Prof. Hu (right.)
For the second component, a total of 25 students completed four one-page essays. Almost all participants mentioned that they were more excited about entering the field of civil engineering after participating in this activity. In essay No.3, Hu asked students to watch an online video featuring Billington’s lecture on Swiss structural artists training at ETH Zurich and then write a reflection on the current engineering curriculum at Ohio State. Most students felt they had not yet had the opportunity to study real-life applications in the classroom. One student stated “I hope that future courses will provide more opportunities for civil engineering students to design physical models of their structures.”

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Graduate student judges Ben Colbert (left) and Natalie Gibbons (right) evaluate the 3D-printed Space Needle
For the design exhibition, a team of three students worked on the design and analysis of a pre-selected structure based on their own interest. Each team consisted of a manager, a designer, and a builder. Over four weeks, teams conducted literature reviews, built geometric models, conducted analysis and fabricated structures. The design exhibition was a successful event that featured 23 student teams that presented posters and models of well-known bridges, buildings and towers from around the world, Faculty and graduate students from the Department of Civil, Environmental and Geodetic Engineering (CEGE) served as judges.

First place was awarded to Team 1 (Austin Dittoe, Cody Johnson, Sydney Stefanek) for its tremendous effort in completing the Alamillo Bridge model. Reflecting on this project, the student team wrote “This project is a great tool to improve teamwork skills and sharpen our structural analysis skills by utilizing a real-life structure to show the difficulties of real modeling.” Three other teams also received prizes:

  • Second place: Team 15 (Katelyn Penza, Michael Depiero, Jessica Miller)
  • Third place: Team 3 (Ryan Hudson, Ryan Maitland, Dominic Caracci)
  • Honorable mention: Team 0 (Connor Higgins and Raina Rotondo)

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Prof. Nan Hu (right) discusses the structural concept of the Alamillo Bridge with civil engineering student Austin Dittoe (left), whose team received the first-place vote of the design exhibition.

Most teams described the design challenge as an unexpected and refreshing experience. “This project was an engaging culmination of the skills and knowledge obtained from the CIVILEN 3310 course. The project allowed students to channel their knowledge of structural engineering principles into practical application," said the members of Team 0. Team 3 added that "going into it, we had no idea what to expect because we had only done analysis on beams and frames. But after this project, doing structural analysis on a large
building is a lot easier than we anticipated.”


Several graduate student judges who attended Ohio State as undergraduates said they wish they could have had this opportunity to design and analyze a real-life structure during their previous studies. Allison MacKay, Professor and Chair of CEGE attended the event and oberved that she "could feel the excitement among the students when I walked into room during set-up. It is an excellent example of teaching innovation and student engagement that is of great value in our curriculum," she added. With this and other feedback, Hu will continue his efforts on teaching innovation and has proposed a new, interdisciplinary course on the topic of structural design. “I am thrilled to see how the design exhibition turns out,” Hu said. “We overemphasize the calculation, but we need to teach our students how to be creative as an engineer.” The design exhibition was sponsored through Professor Hu's OSTEP fellowship and was further supported by CEGE departmental funds.

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