B6 - Course Reflection

For this course AE510, it left me with a deep impression. I have learned a lot of new design techniques and architectural concepts. I think it will be very helpful for my future development in this industry.

Before this course, I only can use AutoCAD to design buildings or draw something. The professor taught us our new design software, Revit, and the new concept, BIM. This is a new tool for architecture, engineering and civil engineering. It is easier to design the building we want. When I saw this software first time, I was very interested in it. In the class, we simply learned the basic operations of Revit and designed a simple architectural model. For this software, I also learned more and used Revit to complete my final project: based on the existing building model,  re-optimize the building structure and reconstruct a new building model.

About BIM, I think the most important advantage of it is that it provides a visual idea for people to see a three-dimensional solid object. In the BIM building information model, the results of visualization are not only that it can be used to display the renderings and report generation, but also that the communication, discussion and decision making during project design, construction and operation are all under visual state.

In addition, one interesting part of this course is that sometime there are alumni or other scholars in our industry who would come to the course to share his or her thoughts with us. This gave me a lot of insights and deepened understanding of this industry. I remember the Sensors Introduction from. He used smartphone as an example to introduce a variety of sensors and their relationship.

In this course, I also learned a lot of new concepts, for example: BIM, 3D printing, sensors, SQL, etc. Although we have not specifically studied the technology, we have a basic understanding of these concepts. Every week we need to read a lot of papers, and then through the blog, we have published some understanding of these technical concepts, and communicated with the students.  For so many new concepts, I am still most impressed by the robots that the first class professors showed me. The human-like robots from Boston, like the actual human movements, are automatically adjusted to balance and calculate the motion path. This makes me wonder about the drawbacks of these technological developments: will it happen that in one day robots will replace humans? Will there be a lot of people who lose their jobs because of robots? How to prevent these technologies from being used in bad thing, such as terrorist attacks or even non-peace wars. I believe that while learning these knowledge, we also need to consider about humanity and morality.

Comment:

To  Harvin Bhandal:

I agree with you the last paragraph of the content. As you said, the development of the technology industry will absolutely benefit people. But I always believe that while developing new technologies, we must always be based on human beings themselves. For a simple example, weapons used to protect our personal safety are correct, 100% correct, but some lawbreaker will use it to hurt others. So we must prevent weapons from being gotten by these bad people. For this point, I just want to say that when we study new technologies, we must consider more comprehensive.

To Nick Maloney:

In your blog, you said that this lesson covers a lot of new concepts, which make us have more something to talk when we communicate with others. I think this is correct. After learning this lesson, what makes us different is that we have improved our knowledge and have different thinking about technology. There is no doubt that this will be very helpful for our future career prospects.

To  Matt Mullen:

That's right, I also agree with what you said: we can watch some instructional videos when we are doing Revit or database assignments. In the lecture, we always miss some knowledge, but if we have these videos, we can complete our work step by step according to the instructions of these videos. I think these video are very helpful for novices to learn.