DIGITAL TECHNOLOGY AND DISRUPTIVE EDUCATION: AN APPLIED CASE FOR FOUNDATION ENGINEERING

Abstract

Breaking paradigms in teaching methods has become increasingly necessary for student development, as implementing more interactive, practical, and collaborative teaching approaches is essential for fostering critical, creative, and adaptive skills—key to comprehensive academic formation. It is worth highlighting that the new national curricular guidelines for engineering (DCNs) recommend that undergraduate engineering programs should equip graduates with appropriate techniques for observing, understanding, recording, and analyzing users’ needs and their social, cultural, legal, environmental, and economic contexts. Furthermore, they should be able to broadly and systematically formulate engineering problems, considering the user and their context, devising creative solutions, and applying suitable techniques. Within this context, this activity aims to present the effects of a disruptive experience in an elective course of the Civil Engineering program. Using the Maker Culture and additive manufacturing (3D printing), different spacers for foundation elements were fabricated and tested to identify relationships between infill percentage and compressive failure load. The results reveal the impact of certain printing variables on the compressive strength of the spacers, while also providing quantitative data to support the alternative and autonomous production of spacers with higher cover requirements.