Emerging cad and bim trends in the aec education: An analysis from students\u27 perspective

As the construction industry is moving towards collaborative design and construction practices globally, training the architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) students professionally related to CAD and BIM became a necessity rather than an option. The advancement in the industry has led to collaborative modelling environments, such as building information modelling (BIM), as an alternative to computer-aided design (CAD) drafting. Educators have shown interest in integrating BIM into the AEC curriculum, where teaching CAD and BIM simultaneously became a challenge due to the differences of two systems. One of the major challenges was to find the appropriate teaching techniques, as educators were unaware of the AEC students’ learning path in CAD and BIM. In order to make sure students learn and benefit from both CAD and BIM, the learning path should be revealed from students’ perspective. This paper summarizes the background and differences of CAD and BIM education, and how the transition from CAD to BIM can be achieved for collaborative working practices. The analysis was performed on freshman and junior level courses to learn the perception of students about CAD and BIM education. A dual-track survey was used to collect responses from AEC students in four consecutive years. The results showed that students prefer BIM to CAD in terms of the friendliness of the user-interface, help functions, and self-detection of mistakes. The survey also revealed that most of the students believed in the need for a BIM specialty course with Construction Management (CM), Structure, and Mechanical-Electrical-Plumbing (MEP) areas. The benefits and challenges of both CAD and BIM-based software from students’ perspectives helps to improve the learning outcomes of CAD/BIM courses to better help students in their learning process, and works as a guideline for educators on how to design and teach CAD/BIM courses simultaneously by considering the learning process and perspectives of students. © 2018 The autho

Visualizing Fantasy Fiction: Design of a Class in Digital Scholarship and Visualization, including Research, Organization and Digital Visualization, that Does Not Require Programming or IT support

This paper outlines a course to integrate digital visualizations into undergraduate research. These visualizations will include mapping and timelines of events, and the ability to hyperlink the events, characters, and story lines in a fantasy fiction story such as Lord of the Rings or A Game of Thrones. The digital scholarship will involve the methodology for collecting, organizing, and representing the data for the visualizations. The topic for the visualizations in this paper is fantasy fiction; however the methods to develop these visualizations will be applicable to many academic disciplines, including the humanities and social sciences. The paper outlines the justification for this class, the appropriate audience for this class, and the tools needed. Types of projects and homework assignments to implement the visualizations are suggested. It concludes with a syllabus outlining a typical schedule for this class

Living-learning communities improve first-year engineering student academic performance and retention at a small private university

Living-Learning Communities (LLCs), in which students share a residence, one or more classes, and extracurricular activities, have been shown to improve first-year student engagement, academic performance, and retention in non-engineering fields. Research on Engineering LLCs has focused primarily on student engagement. Two studies to examine performance and retention found that LLCs had little effect on first-semester grades but increased first-year retention in engineering by 2 to 12%. Unfortunately, one of these studies did not control for differences in incoming student characteristics, and another used a comparison group that differed little from the LLC group, possibly causing them to understate the LLC’s true effects. To improve our understanding, this paper examines performance and retention in the inaugural Engineering LLCs at a small, private non-profit, regional university in the northeastern United States. Results indicate that 82% of the Engineering LLC participants were retained within the engineering program, compared to 66% of first-year engineering students who chose not to participate. More strikingly, the average first-semester GPA of the LLC participants was 0.31 points (nearly a third of a letter grade) higher than that of the non-participants. To address the possibility that these improvements were caused by differences in incoming student characteristics, linear and logistic regression analyses were performed to control for gender, race/ethnicity, SAT scores, and other factors. These analyses suggest that LLC participation increased GPA by 0.35 points compared to first-year engineering students from prior years, while non-participation lowered GPA by 0.07 points. LLC participation increased the odds of retention in the major by 2.3 times compared to first-year students from prior years, while nonparticipation lowered the odds of retention by 1.35 times

Teaching Parallel Computing to Freshmen

Parallelism is the future of computing and computer science and should therefore be at the heart of the CS curriculum. Instead of continuing along the evolutionary path by introducing parallel computation “top down” (first in special junior-senior level courses), we are taking a radical approach and introducing parallelism at the earliest possible stages of instruction. Specifically, we are developing a completely new freshman-level course on data structures that integrates parallel computation naturally, and retains the emphasis on laboratory instruction. This will help to steer our curriculum as expeditiously as possible toward parallel computing. Our approach is novel in three distinct and essential ways. First, we will teach parallel computing to freshmen in a course designed from beginning to end to do so. Second, we will motivate the course with examples from scientific computation. Third, we use multimedia and visualization as instructional aids. We have two primary objectives: to begin a reform of our undergraduate curriculum with an laboratory-based freshman course on parallel computation, and to produce tools and methodologies that improve student understanding of the basic principles of parallel computing. Parallelism is the future of computing and computer science and should therefore be at the heart of the CS curriculum. Instead of continuing along the evolutionary path by introducing parallel computation “top down” (first in special junior-senior level courses), we are taking a radical approach and introducing parallelism at the earliest possible stages of instruction. Specifically, we are developing a completely new freshman-level course on data structures that integrates parallel computation naturally, and retains the emphasis on laboratory instruction. This will help to steer our curriculum as expeditiously as possible toward parallel computing. Our approach is novel in three distinct and essential ways. First, we will teach parallel computing to freshmen in a course designed from beginning to end to do so. Second, we will motivate the course with examples from scientific computation. Third, we use multimedia and visualization as instructional aids. We have two primary objectives: to begin a reform of our undergraduate curriculum with an laboratory-based freshman course on parallel computation, and to produce tools and methodologies that improve student understanding of the basic principles of parallel computing

Development and Evaluation of a Simulation Tool for Robotics Education

This IQP is aimed at constructing a virtual robotic simulator and then testing its effectiveness as a learning tool. After researching other simulators, the team developed a simulator called Lua Visual. To determine if Lua Visual could be used as learning tool, the team tested how both high school and college students reacted to the software. The results suggested that simulators like Lua Visual would be very useful for robotics education. Video of the simulator can be found here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cG5vG_-0UY

Active Learning in Sophomore Mathematics: A Cautionary Tale

Math 245: Multivariate Calculus, Linear Algebra, and Differential Equations with Computer I is the first half of a year-long sophomore sequence that emphasizes the subjects\u27 interconnections and grounding in real-world applications. The sequence is aimed primarily at students from physical and mathematical sciences and engineering. In Fall, 1998, as a result of my affiliation with the Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics Teacher Education Collaborative (STEMTEC), I continued and extended previously-introduced reforms in Math 245, including: motivating mathematical ideas with real-world phenomena; student use of computer technology; and, learning by discovery and experimentation. I also introduced additional pedagogical strategies for more actively involving the students in their own learning—a collaborative exam component and in-class problem-solving exercises. The in-class exercises were well received and usually productive; two were especially effective at revealing normally unarticulated thinking. The collaborative exam component was of questionable benefit and was subsequently abandoned. Overall student performance, as measured by traditional means, was disappointing. Among the plausible reasons for this result is that too much material was covered in too short a time. Experience here suggests that active-learning strategies can be useful, but are unlikely to succeed unless one sets realistic limits to content coverage