Tuesday, March 10, 2015

B8-Jinhao Liang-Course Reflection

As a structure engineering student, I am glad to attend this AE course that will broaden my existing skills in engineering. I have to admit that I am a novice in architecture and have no idea about the intelligent building. I didn’t know what we will learn in this course at the beginning, probably about designing models in Revit or AutoCAD. However, there were numerous topics discussed in following classes and they are tightly related to intelligent building, such as sensors, robots and future techniques. In this class, Professor Mitchell divided us into 5 groups to discuss BIM, Network, and database, the relationship between Revit and AutoCAD, and so forth, and required us to post an outcome on the blog. This deepen our feeling towards intelligent buildings and promoted us to have different perspectives to look at these techniques.
I understand that lots of topics referred to the database, sensors and green buildings, which are tightly each other. They are shared in the Evernote where we could read these materials to gain a wide knowledge that I didn’t realize before. Two projects, the database assignment and the BIM model assignment, currently are very helpful for me to apply in engineering design, especially for my senior design project. For the model assignment designed in Revit, we don’t need to consider the structure and the force analysis. I completed a three-floor building and arranged different furniture models on each floor, such as table and chairs. For the database design assignment, I learned how to create tables, queries, forms, and report through Microsoft Access. Understanding the relationship between tables is critical for completing a more complicated database. I almost mastered how to use it and have completed a database combined with 4 furniture and 6 sensors.
Professor Mitchell doesn’t try to confuse us in these technical levels because he offers detailed tutorials to us that was made by himself. His purpose was trying to have us learn something as much as possible. Therefore, there was a weekly assignment that would be assigned and we were required to post it on the blogger to share them to classmates. I have never done this before and it is pretty interesting to read others’ blogs and have comments on two or three students’ articles. It means we could, in the meantime, learn 2 to 3 topics in one assignment. There were three guest lectures were given during the 10 weeks. They presented a more professional presentation and shared their occupational experience that made us know how BIM works in construction companies and how intelligent systems like BAS applies in buildings. Finally, I have to say this class is worth to attend and it is helpful for our future career.
Comments:
Jonathan Plotkin: I agree that this course is not just  about the focus on buildings, but how people themselves interact with each other. It was also really interesting that we added the information about sensors into google sheets. We can share the data collected from the website and input the price, the dimension and functions. At least I enjoyed these process, we can learn from each other. The materials what professor Mitchell shared in the Evernote is also really helpful for us to understand the intelligent building.
Pangyan Zhang: I admit that I am confused about this class at the beginning. I think this is probably a writing class. However, we really learned a lot from this class, especially about the function of sensors and building information management. I also learned how to use Revit that could be applied in the senior design project. I think that the MS access will be the most useful skill in the future career because database will be the critical resources for these big companies.
Catherine Stephens: I agree that the BIM is a very significant knowledge we learned at the beginning. Thank you for your sharing about the information that  many companies are hiring Civil and Architectural Engineers with experience using BIM. Maybe I think I should turn back to reread the article about BIM again. I also agree that the guest lecture is important for me to how the intelligent building works in the reality and I also expect to be an intelligent building designer.

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