This paper presents a simplified numerical simulation tool for the elasto-plastic calculation of plane articulated truss by the finite element method (FEM) in MATLAB. The simplified approach consists of linearizing isotropic strain-hardening (to obtain a bilinear material law). The numerical implementation is built on the basis of the incremental and iterative FEM algorithms. The numerical resolution technique used is based on the projection methods of the modified Newton-Raphson solution. The MATLAB program is developed for the application of a 3-bar truss under monotonous quasi-static loading. Different values of the approximation error of the convergence criterion are used to study its impact on the quality of the algorithm. Numerical simulations have shown the reliability and quality of our simplified approach regardless of the approximation error.