Term Project Design for Undergraduate Building Information Modeling Education

As Building Information Modeling (BIM) has been identified as a new paradigm which could significantly improve productivities and efficiencies in the architecture, engineering and construction (AEC) industry, the methods of teaching BIM start to get attention in academia. It is important for the students to get familiar with the BIM authoring tools in order to achieve the benefits of BIM. To effectively teach the BIM authoring tools, BIM instructors are always required to spend a huge amount of time in lab sessions. However, it is hard for instructors to decide at the beginning of the classes about how much time should be assigned on mastering each function of BIM authoring tools. This study aims to quantify the modeling time of students for each modeling function in their term projects, and further identify the time distribution in the modeling process. Students’ modeling progresses in term projects have been monitored for two semesters. Each student is required to report their time spent on each of the element categories of their models. The analysis of this study will provide BIM instructors a guidance to design term projects in BIM courses. Furthermore, it is expected to help arrange the time distribution of lecture and lab session for different functions of the BIM software. BIM instructors can provide more appropriate project sizes and requirements for the students to achieve in a reasonable lab time.