Tuesday, October 6, 2009

Assignment Change – An effect of my visits

One result of visiting all the AE programs this last year was that I decided that in my own program I wasn’t doing enough to expose and enthuse students about current developments in buildings.  I was particularly inspired by what I saw Greg Brooks doing at UT Austin though I didn’t try and directly copy him.

My response was to revise an assignment (one of seven) in  the junior-year course, AE-390, “Architectural Engineering Design-I” using as a starting point a book that Greg recommended to me.  The goal was to have students choose from a variety of contemporary buildings and then analyze and present those buildings in both architectural and engineering terms.  Links to the results as well as the assignment that they were operating from are available on this page.  As usual in my assignments I was trying to address multiple issues which will be evident on reading the assignment.

I leave judgments about the quality of the results to the reader, but clearly I wouldn’t be posting them if I weren’t pleased with the change.  My conclusion is that my sabbatical has helped my students.  For that I thank all those I visited, with special thanks to Greg.