Interdisciplinary Design Projects in the Education of Civil Engineers.

The education of civil-engineers at Universities in Germany has often been criticized to be too theoretical and to be too detached from practice, often disregarding the fundamental relations to adjacent domains. In this paper an educational approach is illustrated that combines theoretical lectures with extensive project work. These projects begin at the third semester with a simple structural design task, increase successively in complexity and thematic range over the years and end with an inter-disciplinary design project in the last semester. To illustrate this, the way of the students that started their Civil Engineering education in 2004 and who did not only take part in the final inter-disciplinary design project but even erected it with their own hands is being traced in this paper.      «

The education of civil-engineers at Universities in Germany has often been criticized to be too theoretical and to be too detached from practice, often disregarding the fundamental relations to adjacent domains. In this paper an educational approach is illustrated that combines theoretical lectures with extensive project work. These projects begin at the third semester with a simple structural design task, increase successively in complexity and thematic range over the years and end with...     »