School construction sites ... at home. Manual skill in distance teaching experiences

Teaching online has been a testing ground for many teachers, in response to the health emergency from Covid 19 which has imposed updates in the field of teaching. Universities are more advantaged because older kids are more skilled with smartphones and the web. In particular, some Engineering courses have proved to be particularly suitable, offering a better quality of both frontal teaching and design laboratories. But that's not enough! We must work with creativity and stimulate ingeniousness in young people, to the point of making them look for hidden inclinations and latent ambitions. The capacity for educational challenges lives within teachers and tutors who carry out their work with passion, as evidenced by this paper. The technical experience in organizing laboratories and school construction sites has energized in us the will to experiment an innovative teaching approach whose importance becomes even more strategic in the field of university education of the young people who are approaching the profession of engineer in the era of Covid 19. The need to emphasize construction site problems led us to translate the need for direct contact with the construction site into an online school. Attention was paid to the relationship between formwork and concrete castings about the construction of concrete stairs and floors. This topic has become of a unique round table, in which the students of the teaching of Building and Plant Elements (Bachelor's degree in Building Engineering of the University of Naples Federico II) have ventured into the construction of formworks to create stairs and floors, concerning the different construction types. Special "recycled" materials were used for the creation, drawing on easily available materials from waste and household items. This strongly underlined choice is emblematic in the era of Covid when the "red zone" in Naples prevents us from going out and making purchases. But above all, it is a highly educational experience because it stimulates inventiveness and creativity in young people, who increasingly need new motivations. Manual skills can be both discovery and an attitude to be cultivated and encouraged for some young people. Furthermore, the “waste” present in the house was much more than what the young protagonists could imagine: cardboard and packaging cartons, toothpicks, straws for drinks, rice, couscous, flour, pasta etc. etc. "Learning by doing" is undoubtedly the most immediate method to bring students closer to professional practice and to put to the system the knowledge learned in the different teachings that converge in the Bachelor's degree in Building Engineering, from the technology of the materials passing through the technological design, the static of the structures until reaching the organization of a construction site. And so, one the most popular video conferencing platforms Microsoft Teams became a virtual round table for one day, attended by some students from the University of Naples Federico II.