Week-10 Presentations

In the last class each group/individual will have prepared a presentation on their term project kusing PowerPoint. These presentations will be no more than eight minutes long and will have been submitted to VistaBB in advance.

Each topic-group will bring five copies of their PowerPoint slides (4 or six per page is economical) to share with the rest of their class group.
Because there are sixteen groups we cannot hear all of them.  The process we’ll follow, therefore, is to initially split into five class groups.

Group	Teams - See PDF for Topic and Members
A - BIM	5, 8, 12,14, 16
B - Green & BIM	2, 3, 4
C - Green & BIM	7, 9, 15
D - Sensors	6, 13, 18
E - Varied	10, 11, 17

The role of these class groups is to:

• Review the slides and hear a brief description from the others in their group.
• Decide which of them will present to the whole class – for an extra-credit point.
• Be prepared to tell the class about other interesting things they learned in the discussion.

The balance of the class will be devoted to the the five presentations by the chosen individuals/groups.

• Eight minutes long
• Five minutes of discussion after the presentation 

P3–Term Project Draft–Comments

I’ve completed the grading of the term project drafts. 

• For those who provided Word documents I returned the marked-up draft with my comments at the end, and often pasted into the VBB comment box if they weren’t too long. 
• For those who submitted as PDF, I only pasted my comments into the text box of the grading form.

Overall Comments

A few students took a specific idea and pursued it in depth, providing information about the sources and drawing a specific conclusion(s). 

A number of you, however, had problems that I identified in the comments, with at least one suggestion of how to correct the problem.  The kinds of problems I identified included:

• Staying far too general in what you’re saying.  In several cases the papers read as though they could have been prepared without the benefit of anything we’ve discussed in this course.
• Not developing a logical argument leading to a conclusion.  It’s important that your paper first identify and then develop an idea, providing supporting (or sometimes contradicting) evidence for it.
• Not providing evidence for your assertions, either experimental or citations of sources.
• Not taking seriously into account the material that we’ve addressed in this course so far.  This was particularly important for those dealing with BIM issues.  Some of the papers read as though you’d had no experience with BIM and were just reciting manufacturer’s claims.

For those of you addressing the implementation of an “Intelligent Building” in some way I would have hoped that you’d consider the definition that I gave early in the course.  Only one group did so.  It’s not that you have to agree with my definition, it’s that it exists and should be considered, if only to be rejected.

P3, P4 Paper Formatting

Question

I was wondering if our paper should be formatted as a formal research paper or is this more user defined.

Answer

What I care about is that you’re clear, organized and thorough.  That includes citing references and being careful to put in quotes any words taken from another source, including something you’ve written for another purpose (e.g. Senior Design document).  A bibliography is appropriate.

I guess that adds up to a research paper, but the specific format is not critical.

P2–Project Outline Grading Comments

I’ve graded your project outlines and made returned specific comments to each group.  I’m happy to respond to any questions you may have about your specific topic or the project as a whole.  Below are several general comments.

Definition of intelligent building

A number of groups were explicitly addressing Intelligent Buildings in some manner.  Several of them adopted what I would regard as a somewhat narrow definition, albeit one that is accepted in the industry – the most used being one from CABA.  You’re welcome to adopt whatever definition you choose, but I’d at least ask you to explain why you’ve chosen that definition which tends to leave out BIM, databases, robotics and other topics that I’d argue make sense.

Topic Breadth

In almost every instance I advised groups that, given the time available and the number of words in the paper, the ambition for the project exceeded what seemed likely to be accomplished.  I urged narrowing the focus and doing some aspect in depth rather than a journalistic broad sweep.

Building Lifecycle

In many cases there seemed to be an assumption that only one of the phases in a building’s lifecycle needed to be considered.  I urge all of you to think about how your topic may be considered in respect to each phase from project conception, through design, construction, move-in/commissioning, occupancy, renovation and demolition.

Resources Printout–Through 1/26/2012–From MS Access

All your entries so far for the resources that you’ve submitted are now in this 55pp PDF.  I’ll update it as we move forward

• Here’s a short version that can serve as an index
• It should be useful for those of you working on BIM projects
• It’s an example of how one can manipulate information in a Database
  • I downloaded the information from GDocs into Excel
  • I then put it into MS Access and converted it to a relational database using the “analyze” tool in Access.
  • I produced a “report” to print it in this form

Term Project Selections

I’ve compiled your choices for term projects.  They’re in this PDF on Google Docs.

Your choices of subject area (my definitions using the themes of AE-510) are:

• BIM – 5
• Databases  -0
• Green – 6
• Networks – 0
• Robotics – 0
• Sensors – 3
• Technology – 1

For most of the topics I replied with a comment that it was potentially interesting but that to make it useful the person/group would need to narrow the topic considerably.  It’s for more interesting to explore one aspect of a topic in depth than a broad overview.

Term Project Questions

Questions

1. I was unclear about what is due next week for the term project.
2. 1. Do I choose a broad topic or is it more specific?
3. 2. Is this supposed to be a four page research paper with an 8 minute PPT?

Response #1

• A very short submission by each person to VBB containing
• Teammates – if any
• Topic – a sentence or two

Response #2

• The more well defined (narrower) the topic the better.  You’ll need to narrow down a general topic to get anything meaningful at the end, but I’m not insisting on super-specific at this stage.

Response #3

• You are welcome to make it a research paper OR a project of some sort with a document that comments on the project.  The project could be of many types:
• Extension of your BIM capabilities – e.g. Macros
• Building something using 3d Printing
• A video on a related topic
• A website addressing some topic