Week 10 - Course Reflection

When first registering for this class, I honestly did not know what to fully expect or what I was getting myself into.  My best guess as to what this class was going to be about was going to be to design a structure of sorts in a relevant software being used today and then incorporating the different aspects of BIM into the design and life cycle of that structure.  I also thought this class might be about how all of the different software being used today interoperates with each other.  Either way, I knew BIM would be an important topic discussed in this class and I wanted to learn more about it since I know I will be using it extensively in my career.

To an extent, my preconceived ideas of this class were correct in some topics, but wrong on others.  But, not wrong in a bad way.  All of the guest speakers who appeared gave great examples and descriptions of how BIM is incorporated in everyday life how it is applied to a myriad of engineering applications across several disciplines.  Also, in terms of the guest speakers who spoke specifically about a type of software, I enjoyed learning what was different between them and how some software is better for some projects than others. 

In terms of the main ideas and themes of this class, learning how “intelligent buildings” earn that title and how they will continue to become more intelligent in the future interested me a lot.  It is always fun to watch videos online about the houses or businesses of the future, but this class was good at discussing just exactly how those future structures will happen.  The incorporation of sensors that monitor every activity imaginable and then store all of that data in databases capable of sorting it and producing more information was interesting to learn.  I never realized just how many data sets or how much storage and memory is needed in order to fully operate some of these more intelligent systems. 

This class did a great job of introducing all of the details that are associated with the many topics in this class, but I feel as though there could easily be a separate and in-depth class that could be held for each one.  Most notably, the database topic could easily be stretched into a multi-term class to really understand what they are capable of doing. 

Overall, I am glad I took this course and would recommend to others, especially if Professor Mitchell continues to update his lectures and slides as technology improves over the years.

Comments on other posts:

Signe:  I am glad you enjoyed this class and I am curious if there are classes like this back home for you in Denmark that would explore these types of topics, or if their idea of an intelligent building would have a completely different definition. 

Stephen:  I agree with you that the major assignments were helpful learning exercises.  It seems as though getting hands-on with some of the software gives a little better perspective of just how much effort goes into what seems like simple tasks.