A full curriculum in building materials, animated for ETH Zürich.

ETH Zürich’s Department of Civil Engineering set out to transform how chemistry of building materials is taught.

Conceived by Prof. Flatt and funded by a grant from the ETH Zürich Foundation and the Emil Halter Fund, the project reimagined the curriculum around a flipped-classroom model: students acquire core knowledge through videos beforehand, freeing class time for discussion and applied problem-solving.

• Give students control over their own learning, pausing, rewatching, and slowing down on hard concepts, then arriving to class already prepared
• Free up contact hours for applying knowledge, asking questions, and solving problems together, rather than one-directional lecturing

• Equip academics with reusable materials that compound in value across cohorts, effort invested once benefits students year after year
• Make the materials openly available to learners and educators everywhere, extending ETH’s teaching well beyond the lecture hall

• Began with a single pilot animation, then developed the entire curriculum in animated form
• Built a structured illustration system and asset library to accelerate production and deliver the full curriculum within a limited budget

• Designed a consistent colour-coding system carried across text, graphs, and illustrations, helping students track elements and grasp the relationships between components
• Created interactive widgets built in Rive, turning passive viewing into active learning