The inventor of the world-famous Truss Me! app is celebrated for his innovative approach to education
Julian Rimoli
Prof. Julian J. Rimoli

Aerospace Engineering professor Julian J. Rimoli has been selected to receive the Class of 1934 Outstanding Innovative Use of Education Technology Award by the Georgia Tech Faculty Honors Committee. He will officially receive the award during the Faculty Awards Luncheon, April 19.

The award is given each spring to a member of the faculty who has developed and instituted innovative techniques to improve the learning environment and the learning process.

Those words fairly well define Rimoli, who developed Truss Me!, an educational smart phone app that has gained almost a cult following on college campuses around the world.

Some players are undoubtedly Rimoli’s own students, who use the game in their statics class to gain a more intuitive grasp of truss behavior. More than a half million iterations of the game have spread across the globe since it first went on the iTunes store in 2014. ETH Zurich even incorporated the game into its official engineering curriculum at one point.

“I got an email from a civil engineering professor at Purdue, saying his daughter in middle school started playing Truss Me! and loves it. She was actually explaining how she was selecting the length and cross section of the bars to avoid buckling in the moon lander challenge,” Rimoli said.

In announcing their choice of Rimoli for the 2019 award, the Faculty Committee echoed praise that has been heaped on the popular AE professor's work:

"The committee was impressed by your efforts to advance student learning outcomes through the development and use of the Truss Me! app, as well as its documented usefulness for students in secondary and postsecondary education."

Dr. Rimoli has a special interest in problems involving multiple length and time scales, and in the development of theories and computational techniques for seamlessly bridging those scales. He is a member of AIAA, ASME, and USACM and is the recipient of the NSF CAREER Award, the Donald W. Douglas Prize Fellowship, the Ernest E. Sechler Memorial Award in Aeronautics, the James Clerk Maxwell Young Writers Prize, the Loockheed Dean's Award for Excellence in Teaching, and the Goizueta Junior Faculty Professorship.