The Groupthink specification exercise

Abstract. Teaching students to read and write specifications is difficult. It is even more difficult to motivate specifications — to convince students of the value of specifications and make students eager to use them. The Groupthink specification exercise aims to fulfill all these goals. Groupthink is a fun group activity, in the style of a game show, that teaches students about teamwork, communication, and specifications. This exercise teaches students how difficult it is to write an effective specification (determining what needs to be specified, making the choices, and capturing those choices), techniques for getting them right, and criteria for evaluating them. It also gives students practice in doing so, in a fun environment that is conducive to learning. Specifications are used not as an end in themselves, but as a means to solving realistic problems that involve understanding system behavior. Students enjoy the activity, and it improves their ability to read and write specifications. The two-hour, low-prep activity is self-contained, scales from classes of ten to hundreds of students, and can be split into 2one-hoursessionsorintegratedintoanexistingcurriculum.Itisfreely available from the autho

A virtual workbench applied to automation: student's response analysis

This paper presents a Virtual Workbench for Automation teaching/learning at undergraduate education level. The methodology defined as well as the formalism and the software tools adopted in the implementation are presented. A case study is detailed following the defined steps. The platform was tested by students attending the Process Control and Automation curricular unit from the 3rd year of the Master in Engineering and Industrial Management of University of Minho. A questionnaire was design to gauge the undergraduate student's acceptance and the platform' effectiveness. The research found that the Virtual Workbench allows new strategies and teaching methodologies related with laboratorial practice providing illustrative real-world examples.The authors would like to express their acknowledgments to all students for their voluntary co-operation and help on the evaluation of the platform, especially to Nuno Canadas and Carlos Barros on their commitment to its development. The authors are also grateful to the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT) for funding through the R&D project PTDC/CPE-PEC/122329/2010.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Multidisciplinary AEC Education Utilising BIM/PLIM Tools and Processes

© IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2013. The construction industry worldwide is moving towards more collaborative working practices, aided by building information modelling (BIM) tools and processes. BIM could be more accurately described as Project Lifecycle Information Management (PLIM). Many firms are claiming to be ‘doing BIM’, but are just scraping the surface in terms of the benefits that can be leveraged from true integrated, collaborative design and construction. New graduates, trained in collaboration and PLIM techniques will be the best people to drive positive change, but current educational models do not tend to provide these skills. This paper describes current worldwide educational trends in collaborative multidisciplinary education, and a proposed framework to assist academics in implementing changes to AEC curricula