P4–Final Papers Comments

The overall quality of the papers was good, with a considerable range of topics – see below.

Strengths

• You collectively examined a wide range of topics – we’ll hear about many of them in class.
• Several people pushed Revit a long way
• Several wound up questioning how easy this conversion to BIM really is

Problems

• A few people still had papers that were too general
• There were a few problems of lack of citations to support assertions
• A few people didn’t proofread very well and thus had silly grammar errors

 

Topics

01 Tannenbaum, Matt and Milligan, Kevin - BIM Creating Intelligent & Green Buildings
02, Drogalis, James and Young, Charlie - Drexel Smarthouse BIM Modeling
03 Glencross, Brandon and Patel, Neil - Revit Architecture and Structure
04 Belardi, Robert and Mahon, Bill - Robotic Applications in Construction
05 Kahn, Matthew and Regnier, Adam - The Ideal Sensor
06 Jurgelwicz, Kyle - Building a Family in Revit
07 Lin, Shuiqiang - BIM for Suppliers: how adapt in the transforming industry
08 Ferraioli, Michael - Revit Architecture and Structure
11 Matthews, Peter - Revit and Bentley Interchange
12 Donovan, Mark - Website Database Design
13 Brown, Lemond - Robotics in Construction
15 Auman, Jonathan - Safety and Efficiency Improvements with Robotics in Construction
17 Reiter, Squibb, Thorley - Using Revit to Redesign Myers Hall
18 Guarneri, Joesph- BIM Technology in the Construction Industry
19 Vu, Lynn - Cloud Computing & BIM
20 Day, Corey  -  Robotics In Building Automated Systems

P6 Finding Your Team Number

Question

“I was wondering where we find out what team number we are for the week 10 presentations? I read on the blog that you broke the class in to groups that are composed of teams, I just do not know which team number I am.”

Answer

If you go to the P5 Assignment submission you'll see that the line at the top gives your "Term Project - xx" where xx is your team number. I checked this as a student so I know it works.  It's much more evident when I look as a teacher – sorry it's hidden away in that manner.

Smart Buildings = $$

Dr. Haas circulated the following article.

IBM Officials See New Jobs Stemming From Smarter, More Efficient Buildings.

Computerworld (3/2, Thibodeau) reports, "The need to improve the energy efficiency of buildings and the reliability of utilities has created a multi-billion dollar market opportunity for IBM, along with new job opportunities for IT professionals, executives say." The company is busy "developing systems that can turn vast amounts of data collected by sensors, GPS and RFID systems in buildings and infrastructure systems into information that can be acted on to save energy and improve efficiency," which it is marketing as part of its "Smarter Planet" campaign. Officials said the integrated infrastructure and IT systems will require professionals skilled with both. Such programs already exist. "In 2004, Carnegie Mellon University has created a graduate program on advanced infrastructure systems," which exposes civil engineers to research "that requires collaboration with the school's computer science and electrical engineering department."

Week-8 Discussion–Comments

Despite the show of hands in class not finding the discussions that worthwhile I was impressed with the number of useful paper topic suggestions, both for approach and with specific suggestions for information and for focusing the papers.  You did a good job.

Rough Draft of Term Project

A number of you commented on being surprised at the grade for the rough draft stage of the paper.  I have several comments that may be appropriate:

• A rough draft generally means that the entire paper has been thought through, but the wording hasn’t been polished, and some pieces of evidence haven’t been submitted. 
• I’d argue that some preliminary conclusions are reasonable to expect at that stage although they could still be refined.
• Citations needn’t be complete, but at least some indication that there is a source (e.g. [xxxx]) would be desirable.
• The outline doesn’t need to have been slavishly followed.  Your ideas have probably developed as you write.  Nonetheless it is reasonable to expect that there’s an overall subject that the organization of the paper develops an idea, moving towards some form of conclusion.
• The issue of difficulties working with a specific piece of software arose.  Most of your comments appropriately pointed out that it’s more important to write up what worked and what didn’t work, and what was learned in the process, than to persevere to absolute completion.  What I care about is what you learn rather than the specific product.
• For those projecting into the future (robotics) it is reasonable to take the current state of the art and to project based on reasonable assumptions. 
• Reference to other disciplines (automotive, aeronautics etc) is entirely appropriate.
• Reference to science fiction is also OK, although one would like to analyze what technologies need to be developed to make the device possible.

Week-10 Presentations - Plan

In the last class each group/individual will have prepared a presentation on their term project kusing PowerPoint.  These presentations will be no more than eight minutes long  and will have been submitted to VistaBB in advance.

Each topic-group will bring five copies of their PowerPoint slides (4 or six per page is economical) to share with the rest of their class group.

Because there are nineteen groups we cannot hear all of them.  The process we’ll follow, therefore, is to initially split into five class groups.

Group	Teams
A	1, 6, 11, 16
B	2, 7, 12, 17
C	3, 8, 13, 18
D	4, 9, 14, 19
E	5, 10, 20

The role of these class groups is to:

• Review the slides and hear a brief description from the others in their group.
• Decide which of them will present to the whole class – for an extra-credit point.
• Be prepared to tell the class about other interesting things they learned in the discussion.

The balance of the class will be devoted to the the five presentations by the chosen individuals/groups.

• Eight minutes long
• Five minutes of discussion after the presentation

A2b–Final Database Comments

Overall you did a good job on the database assignment so there aren’t that many comments.

• Most of you had good databases modeled on the tutorial.  These worked as expected.
• Several of you had trouble with queries because somehow you created extra fields in the queries that either tried to calculate something or ask the user a question.  These can be helpful, but caused problems in this case.
• A few of you followed the model of the first part of the assignment and submitted separate word documents that described your experience and made comments.  This wasn’t an official requirement for the assignment, but made it easier for those who did so to meet the grading criteria to comment on the differences between sensors.
• The number of sensors that people found ranged from six to forty-one.
• Most of you had quite a few worthwhile characteristics, but most also found that manufacturers don’t give you everything you want.

Jim Mitchell

P3–Rough Draft Comments

I’ve graded all the rough drafts and left comments for each one.  Here are some comments that apply to many, but not all of the topics.

General Advice

• Structure your paper.
• An introduction stating your overall “thesis” is very helpful
• Think through the balance of introduction to the actual argument of the paper.  Several of you had introductions longer than the argument.
• Use headings and subheadings to make the flow clear.
• Be careful to use quotations and citations.  I’m checking papes in TurnItIn (no problems found so far)

For Those Doing BIM or Software Projects

• Don’t just do the project and include screen shots.
• Analyze what happened
• Draw conclusions
• Make recommendations for those who wish to do something similar.
• A “Protocol” that recommends specific steps in a sequence may be particularly helpful

For Those Writing General Papers

• Use your engineering training.  Several of you wrote papers that sounded like a popular magazine or a high school senior paper. 
• Don’t just rely on what others tell you.  Use what you’ve learned in the courses and think what is actually happening
• Think what are the limits of any tool – they all have them.
• Use your engineering economic analysis to test assertions such as “exorbitantly expensive”