B7 (or B6?), Group B - Cummings

This class was very much one where you get out what you put in.  It provided us with ample tools to investigate all the topics that were presented in class, but it was up to us to take advantage of them to really learn some things from the course and do above average, instead of just drifting through to the end of the term—which is how I think a graduate-level course should be.  

Speaking from my personal perspective, I always expected this course, “intelligent buildings,” to be quite literally about smart, automated, buildings with sensors and such.  This was definitely touched upon in several ways, with the discussion on sensors, and mention of the internet of things.  I was impressed with the scope beyond this that the course was able to reach, and in my opinion it did so in a very creative way.  I overall gained insight into more things and developed a different perspective than I would have if this were just another technical class on building automation systems, so I am grateful that my initial interpretation of the course description showed to be in some ways wrong.   Some of these include the potential applications of 3D printing and robotics in the building industry.  I value learning these more abstract concepts—not as much in the sense that it may give me a competitive edge in industry—but more so because these concepts have the potential to break the rut of business as usual design-bid-build engineering.  So much of our education as engineers is about a training us to do a job, which is absolutely necessary.  But at least for me, this class was about more.  I believe these types of classes should be considered equally as important as the aforementioned, although I get the sense that they are not considered to be so.  This class was about the improvement of the industry: in what directions it may be improved, the technological, environmental, and also social implications of these improvements, and also the limitations of how far an emerging technology can go.

The class wasn’t only about the abstract.  I thought the BIM, database, and sensor topics had their own benefits too.  I think learning the background operations of how these technologies work instead of simply learning how to operate them is what distinguishes the engineers from other professions.  We should have the critical thinking necessary to know the limitations of the technology we use.  We should know how to proceed when technologies don’t work exactly how they should.  For my term project, I investigated the internal operations of an aerosol sensor.  I realized how crazy of a level of detail the study of these things can go, and how complex of a process is it is to convert individual aerosol particles into meaningful and accurate data.  And I definitely know to what extent to trust certain types of particle sensors after this project.  From the BIM portion of the class, it was obvious that people can (and probably have) gotten PhD’s in the field.  So AE510 certainly did not comprehensively teach us how to understand all of these systems—although it did give us a reasonable amount of background knowledge on technologies relevant to us.  But it did teach us how we should treat the technologies we use, rather than blindly using them.  This was reinforced when—I believe it was the guest lecturer week 6 or 7, but I’m forgetting his name—gave us practical first-hand experience about how the inaccuracies of humidity sensors can affect his practice.  But of course the critical thinking this teaches us, in the context of BIM or databases or sensors, is only useful if we know how to operate the respective technologies, but that can be done over CoOp, in other classes, or on our own time.  

In terms of the academics of this course, I enjoyed the blog post assignments and thought they were an efficient way of making what was lectured in class stick, as well as put importance on paying attention and attending the lecture periods.  One change I would definitely make is trying to turn the single blog post and one-way comment into more of a conversation.  I read a lot of blog posts with very engaging comments that would have led to a very thought provoking conversation, but those good comments were never replied to because after the students (myself included) finished their two comments, they’d cross it off their to-do list and not return to it until next week.  With respect to the term project, its constraints being so flexible was another example of how we only got what we put in.  This was definitely a good thing.  It enabled us to delve into a topic that resonates with us, allowing us to want to put in a lot of work on it to learn more about our chosen topic.  This is compared to most traditional projects where we mindlessly complete a set number of tasks to fulfill requirements without really learning anything valuable, like most undergraduate term projects.



Comments:
Alexis Aikins
Allison Lock