Glued-wood structure development contests for project based learning in engineering and architecture degrees

Abstract

The contests involving the development of glued wood structures represent a motivating challenge for the students. These activitiesare rightfully included in the field of active learning or Project Based Learning. The advantages of these kind of contests is its lowcost, especially when compared to other similar contests such as Formula SAE or others. This makes these competitions affordableto all students. Furthermore, these competitions are more civil engineering oriented. Surprisingly enough, in most of thecompetitions the academic performance has a lot of room for improvement. This is mainly due to the fact that they wereconsidered more as a promotional event than a useful teaching tool, especially in the first editions. In the work presented in thispaper, the technical aspects of these contests have been studied in order to improve, as much as possible, the learning aspect ofthose events. In order to do so, a review of the current state of the art in those contests is performed. After that, some technicalconsiderations on the possibilities that those contests allow are developed. This is done while keeping, as much as possible, thereduced costs of these events. After that, the recommendations have been put into practice in a real scenery and some conclusionsare exposed. This has been made via a pilot experiment where a student has been asked to analyze the glued-wood structure that itwas developed by him in a contest.