P2 - Project Outlines–Grading Comments

I was glad to see that most of you have put serious thought into your projects.  What follows are some comments that I made to individuals that may be relevant to many of you.

Research and Citations

Almost all of your projects are ones that others have attempted/addressed in some manner.  Be sure to perform a reasonable literature search so that you can cite their experience and then compare it to your own.  I suggest that you use, as a minimum:

• Google Search – the obvious starting point for most people
• Google Scholar – it searches the scholarly literature, including patents

 

BIM Projects for Senior Design

Several of you are undertaking projects that enhance your senior design project.  It’s extremely important to be clear how what you’re doing goes beyond what you would have done for Senior Design normally.  By doing so you will be able to compare the results of using these techniques to what you would have achieved without them.

I’d note that these days AE students are using Revit by default in Senior Design.  It’s no longer sufficient to compare a Revit model to what you would have produced with a 2D Autocad or similar program.

 

INTELLIGENT vs. GREEN

Comparing Intelligent Buildings to Green buildings is worthwhile.  It’s important, though, to be sure that you fully explain what you mean by “intelligent” and how it’s used.  One of the best, but not required, ways is to focus on a particular building example and perform the necessary calculations/simulations in order to have meaningful results.

 

BEWARE VAGUE GENERALITIES

As I said in class, I’m looking for projects that use the engineering tools that you’ve learned in your university education.  If the document could equally well have been written by a high school senior after reading a Wikipedia article it won’t do well.  This means thinking critically about the components, operating criteria, realistic costs, boundary conditions, energy requirements etc.

Often a good way to ensure you’ve worked at the necessary level is to apply your general thesis to a particular example, performing necessary calculations and simulations to draw conclusions.