Teaching Methodology for Topography: Didactic Proposal for the Free Station Survey Method

This article presents an innovative proposal for teaching Topography topics, as there are no qualified official publications on the subject of study referring to topographic positioning by the free station method, resulting in a shortage of didactic material on this topic in educational institutions in Brazil. Thus, the research work resulted from the didactics applied in the Topography discipline, of the UFPE's Cartographic Engineering degree program. It was proposed to the students to accomplish some practices of the free station method during the Topography discipline development. Thus, the students carried out a theoretical study on the topic. Subsequently, field work was developed with topographic equipment containing a program for surveying by free station method. Topographic vertices of the cadastral reference network of the “Joaquim Amazonas” campus of UFPE served as reference and adjustment points. A comparative analysis of the results calculated manually with the results obtained by the internal programs of the topographic equipment was carried out, using the official coordinates of the cadastral network as references. A program was developed in MATLAB for fixing the learning, whose results were also compared with the same official reference coordinates. This made it possible to generate a complete quantitative statistical analysis of the results.