2008 Entries and Abstracts
William O'Brien
Civil, Architectural, and Environmental Engineering
Expanding the Classroom: Mobile Technologies for Construction Education
We use mobile technologies – tablet PCs and sensors – to expand the classroom. Our pedagogical domain is construction engineering and project management. Construction as a discipline is difficult to teach in the traditional classroom as much pedagogy concerns spatial reasoning about the layout of job sites, materials flows, work areas, etc. There is only so much one can do in the construction classroom to provide students active learning experiences. At the same time, construction projects are large, always changing, and, at least for students, inherently unsafe for much more than a field trip.
To overcome these challenges, we have developed a custom software platform that runs on tablet PCs and uses sensor motes (devices that can be programmed to mimic a variety of sensors used in commercial applications). This set of hardware and software allows us to virtually recreate a jobsite in a large scale yet safe environment. For example, we use a floor of the Ernest Cockrell Jr. Hall (ECJ) to simulate a construction project; specific pedagogical goals relate to materials management and scheduling. Sensor motes are placed around the floor and students carry the tablets to discover the motes, which represent pallets of materials. Within our tablet PC application, students locate the motes on a floor plan graphic, then status a schedule by comparing planned work to what work is possible with the located materials. They then analyze the schedule and recommend alternatives based on the available materials. This learning exercise is performed singly or in pairs. Learning objectives include locating materials, reading a construction floor plan and its relation to physical structures, and analyzing schedules. The students also learn about technologies and teamwork skills.
It is important to note that our technology is customizable in multiple ways. For a given learning module and associated objectives, the floor plan graphic can be changed. This allows us to deploy the module in any location – a building, outdoors, even a live construction site off hours. We can safely and repeatedly deploy our technology as it makes sense in the context of a given course. At the same time, we are not limited to a specific learning objective. We have designed our technology to support a variety of learning applications. The back end of the technology is flexible and can read the sensor motes, which in turn can be programmed to mimic a variety of commercial sensors, from materials tags to safety monitors for noxious gasses. The front end or interface used by the students is developed using readily available programming tools and customized for a variety of applications, from materials management to safety. In this way we expand the classroom to encompass a much larger, more realistic and safe imitation of the construction site. With a range of learning modules, we will eventually be able support a sequence of construction courses, providing active learning experiences for the students with our innovative technologies.