2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

A hands-on application project perfect for a statics course, with EDI (Equity, Diversity and Inclusion or DEI) and EML (Entrepreneurial Mindset Learning) focus.

In four-year college engineering programs, the middle two years are known to be largely lecture based with little innovative and entrepreneurial teaching applications. In this paper, we highlight a 7-week long hands-on, lab-based project in Statics, a core engineering class usually taken in the sophomore year of engineering tracks. This effort includes a real-life application design and manufacturing of a steel bridge prototype with a focus on equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) in Civil Engineering. Students research the effects of civil infrastructure on communities and develop applicable solutions to these problems.

One of the largest infrastructure investments is arguably the Federal-Aid Highway act signed by President Dwight D. Eisenhower on June 29, 1956. The bill authorized the use of $25 billion handled in a Highway Trust Fund, in which federal money as well as state money was used to build the Interstate Highway System. Although designed to enhance national security and support the developing economy, the highways built disproportionately cut through thriving under-represented minoritized (URM) neighborhoods and decimated their communities. Currently, there is a push to re-tie these neighborhoods by building caps over the interstates to develop new community spaces.

Inspired by innovative efforts to remedy the effects of the Highway Act, the statics project teaches students to design and build a prototype of a steel bridge capping interstate 40 along Jefferson Street in Nashville TN. It utilizes statics concepts in structural analysis for truss design and moment of inertia calculations, and more advanced concepts from mechanics of materials in yielding and buckling. Students learn how to weld and assemble steel structures and test them in the lab. They compare the test results to their calculations. They involve the community in their design requesting feedback using written communication. They also reflect on the lessons learned, and how this can help them become better engineers in the future.

This project utilizes the Kern Family Foundation definition of entrepreneurial mindset learning by building on the 3Cs: Curiosity, Connections and Creating Value. It opens the door for students to research the effect of civil engineering infrastructure on communities and challenges them to be mindful about their future structural designs’ impacts. Students are taught to fix problems created by previous generations of engineers in an innovative fashion as they connect with the community they serve. This adds value to their design by learning what the community truly appreciates and needs.

We will be showing performance and qualitative data from cohorts of students who have taken traditional statics prior to this effort, cohorts who have done this project in statics, and a special undergraduate cohort that assisted the students in the lab (were involved in the hands-on portion) but did not do the full project (no EDI application). Future work based on this effort will create a balsa version of this bridge to ensure an equitable application without an economical burden.