B8 - Group D Jiaao Wu

Reflect on course

The first reason I chose this course is the course name called “Intelligent Buildings”. Before taking this course, I have a question in my mind that what progress has been made in the industry of intelligent buildings. In my opinion, intelligent buildings will be the most popular trend in building industry. As what I have stated in our group’s project, although some people think that intelligent buildings may not be much sustainable in some categories. However, I believe any effort will be made to improve this.

Back to this course, I think Professor Mitchell has a very good plan to teach this course. BIM model and database would be the two major components of an intelligent building. Courses related to BIM software give me an opportunity to have a taste of different software, and to understand the advantages and disadvantages among those software. I think I will never forget the difference between AutoCAD 3D and Revit, since Professor Mitchell explained it very clearly. For the use of database, I have never worked on Access before this course. Two exercises related to this topic bring me into the database world. With the help of several tutorials prepared by Professor Mitchell, I understand the basic structure of the database and how different tables are linked each other with the function of key number.

Besides two major components included in this course, I also like the guest speeches and weekly blogs. To be honest, at the very beginning, I did not like the weekly blogs that much. I did not think it would help me for this course. After two or three weekly blogs, I changed my mind. I began to understand that posting weekly blog is a great chance for me to read a lot of articles outside of class. Combined with the in-class contents, it inspired me a lot of thinking about intelligent buildings. In addition, I also think guest speeches can provide us a chance to hear the opinions from the industry. For myself, my ultimate goal is going to industrial world after completing my M.S degree. The guest speeches gave me a general idea about the industry. Since I am very interested in Structural Engineering, I believe, more intelligent items would be adopted into this field.

I also have some suggestions for this course. The first one is the class time. Many of us think that the meeting time is a little bit late. I often lost my concentration in the second part of the lecture time. The second one is the final project. It is little bit difficult to fully express our points in a 1000-word research paper. I think it would be a better idea to provide some specific topics for student to choose.

Overall, I like this course and I will definitely recommend it to my colleagues.


Comment:

To Mark: I agree that BIM model in this class would be the most useful output for the future study. Having a good knowledge on BIM can have many benefits especially for Civil and Architecture Engineering.

To Jinhao: I agree that the tutorials provided by Professor Mitchell helped us a lot during the course. And Professor Mitchell did well in explaining the technique terminology to the whole class. I would also like to thank you for your effort during the final project.

To Ami: It is good to see that you already have a very clear plan for your career. I believe that stuff we have learned in this course would definitely help you to fulfill your career goal. Take the advantage of BIM software will help a lot for a project manager.