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.

What Faculty have to Share and Want to Know

Two of the questions at the end of the survey asked:

1)  What do you do currently that you see as most successful that other instructors or schools might adopt?

2) What things do you think you might learn from other schools that would help you?

The answers to those questions are now available (58/105 answered one or the other).

Themes seem to be:

• BIM/Revit
• Capstone Design
• Practice/Practitioner interaction updating
• Integrated design - with other engineering disciplines as well as architecture

Definitions of Architectural Engineering Design

The  Google-docs spreadsheet linked here presents the first batch of data from which I'll draw conclusions, starting with the paper I'll be giving at the ASEE Conference in June (6/16 2:15-4:00 - #2506: Beneficial Case Studies in AEC Education). 

It should be interesting to those who want to know what are the definitions of AE Design given by the faculty, and also what are the characteristics of the AE faculty.

What you'll find in the spreadsheet are:

AE Design Definitions - Gives all the definitions of AE Design associated by the University of the respondent. It also gives their comments if they felt that their definition was different either from their school's definition or the national definition. Finally, it gives the coding on 9 scales I developed.

Characteristics - Gives the summary of characteristics of the respondents and their mean scores on the coding of the definition of AE Design.

Interviews by Univ - Gives the number of oral interviews conducted at each university during my sabbatical visits.

Anonymity

I believe I've been very careful to remove any identifying information either directly or through cross reference, while attempting to leave the definitions as the respondents entered them as intact as possible.

If you find any means to identify yourself or another individual please let me know so I can correct the problem.

Approaches to Teaching AE Design

One of the questions I've asked on the survey/questionnaire that I'm developing is which approaches to teaching AE Design do the faculty use.  I've included links to most of them below to help anyone who's uncertain of the meaning I intend.

• Lecture 
• Architectural Studio 
• Modified Studio - Architectural Studio modified, especially by emphasizing team-based projects 
• Case Study
  
• Problem-Based Learning 
• Guided Design 
• Socratic 
• Other