A2–Student Comments & Suggestions

Below are student comments and suggestions.   I’ve added a response below each one. 

Jim Mitchell

“.. .Although this should be the student’s responsibility, a possible way to ensure that students fully understanding each topic would be to ask one student to do the calculations, then have another student write an explanation of how the calculations were performed. This would force the students to interact and discuss the process, but may not be necessary for those students who are self-motivated and eager to take part in learning about each system for their assigned building.

JEM – Nice suggestion.  I hope you follow it in future.

It may also be beneficial for the students to present the system that they did not do the research/calculations for. This would force them to get a full understanding of how the system is reflected in their building, rather than just focusing on one individual system. By combining the understanding of the Architectural, Structural and HVAC systems an understanding of the entire building, inside and out, is developed. The students are then able to see how the design of the structure affects the design of the mechanical systems, or vice versa. Knowing how these systems interact and how they influence the overall design is an important concept that is integral to move forward as an architectural engineer.”

JEM – again a nice suggestion, well worth following.

“This assignment could be improved with more help on choosing a building. As students we are still learning about buildings and I feel that a very difficult part of this assignment, for our group, was choosing a building. With more guidelines on how to choose a building and what to look for in a building that is manageable, the building selection process would have gone a lot smoother.”

JEM – I’d argue that almost any building would suffice.  There isn’t a perfect one.  Making quick decisions is a useful skill as well.

“This assignment was a large workload in a very small time frame. The temptation is to suggest eliminating some of the assignments or giving the students more time. While I would appreciate both of those, I realize that this workload prepares us for not only senior design, but also the real world. Some elements of this assignment that seem unnecessary are the amount of focus placed on the architectural system. Perhaps I am just biased as an engineer, but the architectural calculations seem to serve little purpose, and I think the analysis section would be adequate. I also don't think it should be necessary to include the Sketch-up file unless the student decided to alter the model for extra credit. It is just the model pulled off of Google's 3D warehouse.”

JEM – This is a reasonable critique.  My response is that understanding the architecture of the building and the architect’s goals is important to the engineering, and not something usually taught in engineering classes

“Some suggestions for this project in the future are that the students should make sure to choose a structure that is reasonable to perform load calculations on.  They should understand that even though most of this project is speculative, choosing a building that can provide you with at least some information is a better idea.  There was some information on our building but none of it was able to help us with the load calculations so all of our calculations are mostly approximations.  Choosing a smaller yet innovative building is probably the best way to go so it isn't too overwhelming.”

JEM – This is reasonable as well.  My thought on not limiting your choices to fairly small buildings (as we do for the rest of the assignments in this course), is that it’s OK to approximate for really big and unusual buildings, and that they can/should be inspiring to an engineer.

* Our group found Architectural Record to be very helpful in our search for information and especially detailed drawings.  - JEM – Good

* While the project calculations are fairly straightforward, any small mistake can add a large degree of error to an already rough-estimate. Especially in the Fall Semester, a short review/overview session of the HVAC and structural calculations necessary may be helpful to student who have not taken or may have forgotten information from pre-requisite courses This seems as if it is asking for the cooling load during the winter: "length of the cooling season" could be changed to "length of the heating season," to clarify its meaning.

JEM – These are good suggestions too.  For the instructors it’s always a balance of time.  We will be providing those reviews as we get to the systems on the other assignments.

Also, your clarification suggestion is worthwhile.