There is a fair objection to putting software like this in front of a student: if the machine draws the bending moment diagram, will they ever learn to draw one themselves?
It is a fair objection, and the answer is in how you build the thing.
Show the working or teach nothing
A tool that returns M = 55.1 kNm and stops has taught a student that structural engineering is a vending machine. A tool that shows the free body, the reactions, the substitution and then the answer has taught them the method — and the second one is barely harder to build.
Every calculation in Movastruct is laid out the way a good lecturer would lay it out on a board: what we know, what we assume, what the clause says, what falls out. A student can follow it line by line, and the ones who do start catching our assumptions before we flag them. That is the whole job, arriving early.
The feedback loop most students never get
The honest problem with learning structures is latency. You hand in a tutorial sheet, and two weeks later you find out that you carried a sign error through six pages. Nothing about that sequence teaches anybody anything.
Do the sheet by hand, then run it and compare in thirty seconds, and the error is still warm. You remember what you were thinking when you made it. That is when a correction actually lands.
For lecturers
If you teach analysis or reinforced concrete design and want to see whether this belongs anywhere near your students, we would genuinely rather hear the sceptical case than the enthusiastic one. Write to us. The people best placed to tell us where this is wrong are the people who have been marking the scripts for twenty years.