Professor Bill Jenkins from Perthshire has sent us this following response to Tim Ibell's excellent Viewpoint article featured in the 20 April Journal.rnI welcome the views expressed by Dr Ibell and agree that in the learning process the traditional treatment of analysis needs considerable modernisation. The emphasis on matrix methods, particularly stiffness matrix computations, needs to be relaxed. The trouble is that this is how it is done in the software but its integration with the modern design process is untidy and inefficient. From the design environment, where things are fluid and uncertain, the student is suddenly plunged into the numerically precise world of analysis.Even a quick approximate analysis is unavailable, so we wait until the design is complete and then analyse it! We can do better than that. Computing speed is now quite phenomenal and memory virtually inexaustible. Why not a computer-based analysis method capable of keeping track with the design? Every design change being automatically analysed, perhaps with a specified target error level which can be changed during the process.
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