Student Studio is a service that aims to radically increase the quality and volume of work experience in the construction and engineering sectors.

Companies using Student Studio have access to a suite of online engineering-related projects that students can work through during placements. These projects, designed to be carried out in a workplace setting, are intended to simulate what it is like to work on a real project, with realistic tasks to be completed and daily milestones to be met.

Bringing everything together is the Student Studio website, a virtual learning environment (VLE) created by Think Up in which students access briefing and supporting information for their projects, interact with students working on other projects in other companies, and record what they are learning in their reflective blog.

At Think Up, we see virtual learning environments as valuable complement to, rather than an replacement of, real learning environments. By combining rich digital resources, accessible through the Student Studio website, with hands-on face-to-face activities with colleagues from the host company, Student Studio creates a highly engaging blended learning.

The Student Studio website is currently undergoing a major rebuild and the new version will be ready for beta testing in Spring 2015.

Employers often complain that graduating structural engineers don’t understand how simple structures behave, despite having spent years studying the formulae that govern structural behaviour. To address this problem Think Up has been developing a range of structural games and simulators that take the maths out of structural engineering and instead help students develop a more intuitive understanding.

The development of these tools has been led by Gennaro Sennatore or Head of Computational Design and Research and a team of international collaborators from industry and academia. The development process has been iterative, at each stage testing what the available technology allows and what benefit learners can derive from it.

The journey began with the creation of Push Me Pull Me, a suite online apps that allows students to push and pull pre-drawn structures using their mouse pointer. These Push Me Pull Me models were based on parametric models, which were pre-calculated.

Following the… success of Push Me Pull Me, Gennaro and his team set about building a real-time physics engine that would allow users to build and manipulate simple pinned truss-based structures. The outcome of this work was the game Catastrophe, in which players can push, pull and remove elements from famous structures until they collapse. Catastrophe featured a ‘sandbox’ mode in which users build and test their own structures, a very popular with students and lecturers.

With Push Me Pull Me 3D Gennaro et al developed a fully 3D real-time physics engine that allowed the construction of structures with flexural elements and fixed connections. Users were also able to import geometries for structures from other CAD software, and to export their creations.

One of the ways that engineers learn about material behaviour is to study material failure. Arguably, the avoidance of material failure is one of the main responsibilities of a civil engineer.

Once-upon-a-time student engineers would have studied how materials behave in the lab. But these days, as labs get shut down to enable a greater rate of return for university estates departments, students get fewer chances to learn about how materials actually behave. Many students turn to online resources to find out what they would have seen in the lab, but what’s available is of highly variable quality.

It is in this context that in 2010 we started to build Materials Lab Online, a collection of definitive high-quality videos that seek to capture material failure with the same degree of clarity as those famous photographs from the 1950s of fluid behaviour familiar to anyone who has studied fluid mechanics. When creating these films, we pay special attention to lining up the right shot, removing any distracting objects from sight and tuning the lighting to achieve a clear and unambiguous view of material failure.

Materials Lab Online first appeared in 2010 as a section on Workshed. The first set of videos were shot with the support of UCL in 2010. Then in 2011 we received a significant grant from CONSTRUCT to create a suite of videos on concrete failure. Most recently in 2014, we received a substantial grant from the Institution of Civil Engineers’ R&D Enabling fund to create 20 new films in partnership with Imperial College Department of Civil Engineering. The Materials Lab Online has grown so much that in 2015 it will be given its own dedicated site.