2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Spreadsheets are ubiquitous in civil engineering offices and are an important tool for data management, engineering calculations, visualization, and report generation. Proficiency in working with spreadsheets also improves productivity and streamlines the quality analysis/quality control process. Cultivating proficiency requires students to integrate spreadsheet usage into their daily activities. While first-year and second-year students may sporadically utilize spreadsheets in their science laboratory courses, they do not necessarily apply spreadsheets in an engineering context.
To better align spreadsheets with the practical experiences of civil engineering students, a series of statics-related assignments were incorporated into a second-year civil engineering course at Saint Louis University, Missouri, United States. Students utilized spreadsheets to solve problems related to centroids and moments of inertia, equilibrium of a particle, shear force and bending moment diagrams, and truss analysis. Most students were concurrently enrolled in a statics course where they solved similar problems using pen and paper calculations and submitted their work.
This research assessed student work, evaluated learning outcomes, and analyzed student feedback regarding the application of spreadsheets to statics topics. A survey was developed to collect students' opinions about competency in spreadsheets, their use in statics, and their utility in understanding concepts. Pre-test and post-test survey analysis revealed an improvement in students' self-reported spreadsheet proficiency, with students notably viewing spreadsheet-based statics problem-solving as a form of hands-on learning. Assessment of students' homework assignments revealed that the majority of students had met the learning outcomes related to the use of spreadsheets and were also able to solve statics problems correctly.