tailieunhanh - Enhancing Global Education: Making Steel Connection Sculpture Available Online to Students in Developing Countries

The form of the barbute was in one other im- portant sense not a new one. The close-fitting barbute, with its narrow opening for the eyes and nose, very much resembles the Corinthian helmet of the Greeks (Figure 8). The barbute, of course, had an independent origin, and this is simply a case of recurrence of type-forged in . | Paper 039 ENT 107 Enhancing Global Education Making Steel Connection Sculpture Available Online to Students in Developing Countries Karen C. Chou and Saeed Moaveni Minnesota State University Abstract Steel connections play important roles in the integrity of a structure and many structural failures are attributed to connection failures. In recent years in order to help civil engineering students better understand the various connection types and their importance many schools in the United States including Minnesota State have acquired steel-connectionsculptures. A steel-connection-sculpture is a physical structure that shows forty eight types of connections found in standard construction practices. It weighs nearly 2500 pounds. The cost of materials fabrication and transportation to a campus site is incurred by the American Institute of Steel Constructions and their corporate members. Unfortunately because of its high cost this type of visual aid is not available to civil engineering students studying abroad especially in developing countries. To provide the same learning opportunities for these students we have created an online interactive version of our steel-connectionsculpture. The interactive sculpture shows the close up view of each connection with descriptions potential failure modes and field examples. It is available twenty-four hours a day to interested students. To measure the effectiveness of the interactive steel sculpture we collaborated with Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology in Ghana West Africa and ask their civil engineering students to examine the helpfulness of this tool. In this paper we describe in detail how this interactive tool can be used to enhance student s learning in a steel design class and its effectiveness. Introduction In almost all the civil engineering programs in the United States a student would be required to take at least one structural design course. Steel and .