Week 10 Course Reflection

Coming into this course I did not really know what to expect.  I hadn’t had really any experience with Intelligent Buildings before this term.  I actually have never even heard that term before.  After completing the course, I now have a great understanding of what the term “Intelligent Building” actually means and it was very interesting to learn about.  I have always wanted to take a course that would teach me more about BIM ever since I was introduced to it on one of my Co/ops.  This, along with many of the other topics covered in this course, were interesting to learn about and very applicable to the real world.

I found the guest speakers to be a nice change of pace and very useful tool.  Instead of coming to class and doing the same thing every week, it was always something new and exciting.  I also enjoyed how most of the time it was group work instead of just a 3 hour lecture.  I learn things a lot better when I am actively working with other people as opposed to just being talked at for a long period of time.  The course had a very good flow to it and it was very rarely boring.

Another thing that was good about this course was that I always knew what was expected of me.   All the assignments were explained fully and clearly and I always knew exactly when they were due.  This made it easy to plan out my work and get everything done in a timely manner.  I also liked the blog posts because it allowed me to reflect on what I learned in class, or get a preview of what was going to be talked about in class.  It also allowed me to see what some of my classmates were learning and it helped me learn even more from them.

Overall, I really enjoyed this class and I think it was very beneficial.  I learned a bunch of new things and had fun doing it.

Comments:

To Brian:  I agree, I think it was very interesting to learn more about what is going to happen in the future with Intelligent Buildings instead of only focusing on what is happening in the present.

To Jeremy:  I too did not know what to expect when first coming in to this course.  It was definitely interesting to learn what Intelligent Buildings are all about though, and to see what they could be like in the future.

Course Reflection

I have thoroughly enjoyed the AE 510, Intelligent Buildings, class this term!  Going into this class I was excited to learn more about what intelligent systems are going into our buildings today.  I thought that we would focus in on Building Automation Systems and other sensor technologies.  While we did cover these we covered so much more as well.   I also found it interesting how we weren’t necessarily covering what currently exists but  more what does the future hold for the built environment through the use of BIM, sensors, building techniques, databases, and robotics.  This goes along with the notion that the technology you buy today is already outdated tomorrow.  Some of the future technologies like 3D printing and robotics I had never really given great thought, but after this class I do see actual potential for these technologies in my lifetime.

Now with all these cool tools and future technologies we discussed what does it mean for me and my career?  Well I have always been a believer that if you aren’t learning and exploring new possibilities than you may as well be dead.  While this may sound rather harsh it is true in today’s society.  There are new technologies and new ways of using old technology coming about everyday and it is important for us as engineers to stay up on this information and pushing the bounds on the projects we are working on with these technologies.  We can never settle for the norm or standard if we wish to continue moving society forward.  Additionally if you become stagnant in your thinking and creativity as an engineer you lose value to you company and potentially jeopardize your career.  This class was perfect for those who wish to continue to learn and push the boundaries.  While on many of the topics we just covered the tip of the iceberg it has given us some information to dive into further detail on these systems.  This springboard in a sense can help spring us forward in our careers and schooling.  Especially today with the great wealth of technology on the internet it is sometimes hard to know where to start or what questions are worth asking and this class helped me at least with this problem.  I would recommend this class to any of my fellow younger classmates as I gained a lot from this class.

Comments:

http://ae-510-ay13-14.blogspot.com/2014/03/final-blog-post-andrew-paladino.html

HAHA.  Andrew it was fun reading your blog post as you are quite the poet.  I would have liked to hear how you thought this class pertained to your future career, but I am glad to hear you liked the class, or at least that’s what I think I got from it.

http://ae-510-ay13-14.blogspot.com/2014/03/week-10-couse-reflection.html

Ian I shared the initial perspective on the class with you.  I am glad though how we learned so much more and I agree the speakers were a great addition to the class.  It will be interesting to see how this impacts us in our careers and in the future.

http://ae-510-ay13-14.blogspot.com/2014/03/course-reflection_914.html

Weiyang I agree pretty much with everything you said.  I think this class was a great overview of the technologies out there and has added to my knowledge of software like access and Revit.  I too did not like the blog post at first but after doing them I did realize just how much I was learning from them.

Final Blog Post - Andrew Paladino

For this week in AE-510, the final week of all of the weeks of the winter term, the week of weeks, the post of posts, on the day of days, the night of nights, the afternoon of afternoons, in the most dire hour of dire hours, in the fleeting minutes of every minute to ever fleet, in this armada of seconds in the fleets of minutes, in this very moment, the final moment in which I will be assigned a blog post in this final week of AE-510, students were asked to reflect on the class and what they learned, and in the moment of moments in which I read this assignment, during the most pressing of times, I seriously considered whether or not my brief, short, transient presence in the class so called AE-510: Intelligent buildings, was worthwhile or not, valuable or not, invaluable or not, during which time I stopped to think about what worthwhileness, valueness, and invaluableness really was, and wherein if by knowing these deep, philosophical, physical, metaphysical, ethical subject matters or not qualified me to comment intelligently on this intelligent class of intelligent buildings, after all, a leopard cannot change its stripes, and who can intelligently comment on how the cow ate the cabbage; thereby, in such aforementioned instances when asked to reflect, consider, contemplate,  meditate, ponder, I must not let myself be thrown for a loop, and realize what this course pounded into my brain, what this whole ball of wax really meant, and how if a bird in the hand is a man in the sand, what does intelligent buildings entail in retrospect and remembrance in the grand scheme of my life beyond the week of weeks, the post of posts, on the day of days, the night of nights, the afternoon of afternoons, in the most dire hour of dire hours, in the fleeting minutes of every minute to ever fleet, in this armada of seconds in the fleets of minutes, in this very moment, the final moment in which I will be assigned a blog post in this final week of AE-510, in my honest opinion, think, with all intended usage of assonance and alliteration, that the class was sincerely all of the positive aforementioned adjectives that project positivity and in one final colloquial statement I’d like to say


Comments:

Steve - How does one even begin to consider the amount of pancakes it takes to shingle a roof? You didn't keep in mind that if a canoe is going upstream it has no wheels. Great post, keep up the good work. Maybe next time don't be such a jerk. 


Phil - In this course, in this course, in this course, in this course, in this course, in this course, well done, and by the way, don't forget to always, under any circumstances, 

Week 10 – Couse Reflection

When I signed up for this course, I had imagined that we would be covering topics which would allow for the creation of buildings that are “better” or substantially “different” than existing buildings. In a way, we covered some topics which fit my initial framing of the class such as 3D additive manufacturing of cement and plastics and BIM but I was somewhat surprised by the discussions of sensors and database.

I’m usually not very fond of in-class speakers for the primary reason that the majority of the time the discussion ends up being very one sided (it’s all on the speaker) and somewhat boring, especially if you just ate a heavy dinner and run the risk of falling asleep. In Intelligent Buildings, however, the speakers were on average much more interesting and engaging. I was very intrigued by the variety and scope of BIM and how it is used/viewed in the industry nowadays and how this technology takes time to reach contractors in the construction world. Some speakers made me appreciate the work they do in the database or sensors realm, which were some of the topics I found least interesting in this course.

Even if I didn’t particularly enjoy the database assignment, it was still worthwhile to experiment with it since I had no prior experience of using MS Access. Learning how to create families in Revit was very worthwhile and made me appreciate the program and discover more of its capabilities. As for the paper we had to write on a specific IB topic, I chose to investigate the potential for using additive manufacturing in construction to create objects with multiple material types in one “print”. I could not find any one example since nobody has developed the technology or the method but I researched current examples of simple additive manufacturing and used my knowledge of the class so far to outline what needed to be done for this particular process to exist.

The blog posts were an intelligent way to get all of the student discussion out in a single, easy to read forum. I suspect this class format would not be this way a few years ago when not everyone had a gmail account, and I suspect this class will continue to evolve as new technologies in the building world continue to surge. Overall, I thought this class was very well worth my time.

Course Reflection

Course Reflection

This course impresses me a lot. I could say it’s my first time to take a course like this. Course content involve with advance technologies. And it’s not just giving you the basic principles of BIM, sensors or database, but we can hear from guest speaker who really have experience about these new technologies. Those experiences we learned will not only help us on understanding, but also help us on experimental side. For the BIM assignment, we have a deeper understanding of families’ components. We learned how to create an object by ourselves. In the future, we can create something that we need, this can make things effective. The database is kind of relating everything we learned in this term together. I don’t know much about MS Access at the beginning and I thought it was useless software in my computer for many years. But after doing research and listen to the guest speaker. I realize that this powerful tool makes all kinds of data organized, easy to find. We not only learned how to create things, but also how to organize them for future use. I think these technologies are important; they are the ways to lead to success in the future.

     The blog post is another wonderful learning tool. I didn't like it at first, because it took so much time to do. But once you get used to it, I feel it’s really help for study. You are not just learned by yourself, you can learn a lot of things from other people’s posts. On the other hand, we interacted with each other to learn knowledge better. In class, the group discussion enhance extend our knowledge.

     Overall, after ten weeks of learning, I feel building in the future will not only involve with architecture idea, but also stuff from other field. Different kinds of technologies made our building intelligent.


To Jeremy:
     I agree with you that course assignments and guest speakers were helped a lot by understand the definition of intelligent building.I would recommend this course to other students too.

To Signe:
     The topic in this class is broader than I thought. But they are related to each other somehow. It is real that this course will help our project in the future.

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.

Course Reflection

Prior to taking this course, I thought its content would be focused on BIM - how to use the different programs and also the design of intelligent buildings itself. I can’t say I’m disappointed; its content is just very far from what I imagined.

As for most things, you never really realize how much lies behind a specific topic, before you actually know. I’ve never looked into databases, and truly thought, “How hard can this be?” Now, I know better, and I am super appreciative that there are people working with this stuff.

This course has a much broader perspective on the building than I thought it would. We’ve touched subjects such as sensors, robotics, databases etc., which I must admit, I’ve never given much thought. It has truly been interesting, even though I really don’t know how much I’m going to use for example MS Acces again.

When we were divided into groups with different subjects, I thought everyone would just focus on their own topic and not even reading each other’s posts. I was quite surprised by how many people commented on completely different topics, which was great. It was also fun to read our classmate’s blog posts – one thing is that it was some interesting topics chosen, but it was also great because you know how much effort and energy everyone put into them.

I think the best thing has been to hear all the different people from the industry talking about their programs and what they think the future is holding.  Also, watching all those Youtube videos in the beginning of the term was very interesting, and it was quite amazing to see how much “the future” is already here.

This course has truly been a great course. Even though I expected something else, I think we’ve all learned a lot, which we can take with us to our future projects.


Comments: 

Andrew: Wauw, you can really say a lot without saying anything. Impressive work! A single period sign or two would've been nice. 

Steve: I think you summed up this class pretty good. I can relate to what you said about the new programs, and how it was a valuable experience.