Hands-on Teaching: The Significance of Introductory Courses in Building Architectural Engineering Curriculum

Abstract

The implications of hands-on introductory courses in architectural engineering (AE) discipline influence students’ comprehension of the interdisciplinary nature of the field and help them build basic needed skills. This chapter reviews the recent inclusion of an introductory course to the Architectural Engineering Curriculum (AEC), at the United Arab Emirates University (UAEU), to provide general insights and to effectively engage teaching tools. Based on the program assessment in Spring 2018, a three credits course Arch 302: Introduction to Architectural Engineering, designed to be taught in a studio format, has been added to the  AE program. The course includes a brief introduction to the AE professions, AE design process, and communication skills and digital tools. Through small project design exercises, the course applies multiple hands-on teaching methods to provide students with basic design skills and formal visual principles with an emphasis on developing creativity and effective communication. In addition to instructors’ experience in teaching the course, a survey has been conducted with AE students to collect insights on the course’s impact on their understanding of the interdisciplinary nature of the AE, and the subsequent design and building construction courses. This paper evaluates the course development, significance, and interrelationships with other courses aligned with the achievement of the course learning outcomes. The outcomes of this assessment shed light on the significance of introductory courses in improving students’ achievement in subsequent courses in terms of understanding the AE interdisciplinary scope of work and gained skills.

1 Introduction

This study aims to assess the inclusion of the hands-on-introductory course significance at the undergraduate level of the Architectural Engineering (AE) Department at United Arab University (UAEU). The course is structured to offer interactive teaching of intertwined disciplines for the students to have a general overview of the AE discipline’s nature and content. Although it has no prerequisite, the course is a core prerequisite to enroll in the AE program. It provides basic practical experience for the students to understand the complexity of the AE program. To meet ABET accreditation continuous improvement requirements of the AE program curriculum, a balance is needed between the engineering and the architectural courses. In addition to raising students’ visual analytical and communication skills, Arch 302 is a stepping stone for the students to understand core concepts of AE discipline such as design, design tools, architecture, form, structure, construction method and systems, design process, design management, tools of design and design standards. As explained in the course syllabus, these concepts and processes are integrated into the course design and segmented into numerous exercises and assignments to apply the hands-on-teaching. The term project serves as an application of the course’s overall contents. By applying multiple hands-on-teaching and digital tools, the inclusion of design thinking to teach architectural design and skills develops students’ critical thinking to adapt to the complexity of the discipline, and AE program in general.

The course is taught in stages where the initial phase intents to focus on building students’ own skills to comprehend what AE discipline is by focusing on the visualization of the architectural side of existing projects, and by building in hand LEGO blocks and drawing the outcomes. Creativity in AE is the core and is emphasized to gradually build and integrate into certain doses based on each course level starting from the introductory level until it is capitalized in the capstone graduate project. To understand the constructs of space and buildings, the students are challenged with three different tasks in the form of practical exercises about form and building components. As such, the project focuses on the construction systems, structure, form, and construction materials. The exercises of the second phase of the course are also practical, putting students in a critical thinking mode to understand the impact of applying alternative scenarios of design conceptualizations. In the discourse of this chapter, the proposed introductory course was examined on four main themes that include perception of AE, hands-on teaching, student engagement and communication skills, and curiosity to knowledge.

• 1. Perception of Architectural Engineering

Creativity is a relative perception from the side of the students and instructors. The course content was balanced between mini-lectures and assigned coursework to apply. Having basic information about the schools of architecture is a relevant point in creating projects and finding structural solutions. Schools such as Bauhaus had a significant impact in improving functional and structural skills in students [4]. The students should be able to realize and solve complexity in the architectural and construction parts of a project. The AE provides the needed skills to develop a student analytical thinking approach is another relevant topic in the early stages of education. In multidisciplinary courses, knowledge and skills are intertwined and supported by theory and practice. This process is also supported by relevant tools such as BIM (Building Information Modeling) and DecidrchV2. These tools give a general overview of the problematic and viable solutions. Focusing on problems to simulate students’ critical thinking process enables them to define specific evaluation criteria toward decision-making through established matrix to assess alternative scenarios, [3, 5].

• 2. Hands-on exercise and diverse teaching

In addition to hands-on teaching to provide learning by doing approach, the use of BIM in the diverse types of AE courses is gradually integrated and coordinated with the application in each course as applicable to its content level. Based on a study done at Penn State University, the implementation of BIM in the AE Department is based on a quality analysis of how the software enters each course (Construction, Lighting/Electrical, Mechanical, and Structural Engineering). This analysis is based on the collaboration integration and technology used in distinct levels throughout the AE program [1].

• 3. Student engagement and communication skills

The blended learning approach is found productive in the transformation of design courses in the AE program from face-to-face to mixed learning with the online system. Based on case study methodology, this investigation finds out that there was no loss of academic conceptualization when face-to-face teaching is replaced as it introduces a new form of engagement. This has been achieved by maintaining the balance between independent and group learning to bring a successful transformation of the conventional teaching approach (face-to-face teaching) [8]. The practice of conventional ‘design tools’ to create a new generation of skilled professionals is changing. Looking at case studies and applications in different worldwide architectural schools, teaching in academia is focusing more on the industry market. This is due to the need for adaptation to the growing speed of technology. By introducing the students to different problematic and practical obstacles, along with updated technology, they not only adapt faster, but also moderate their behavior in gaining more confidence in solving presumed problems. This is a crucial element in creating professionals with strong ethics and discipline knowledge [6].

• 4. Curiosity to knowledge

Understanding spatial geometry in AE courses is a challenging process. Since this profession is mainly integrated with building form, volume, façade, structural elements, geometry, and the physics behind it, are relevant to students imaginative capabilities. At the University of Texas at Austin, an introduction to Euclidean and Parabolic geometries has been organized in content units and showed to be a productive tool in strengthening AEs' skills in the understanding of geometric concepts and approaches [2]. Such elements are fundamental toward increasing students’ comprehension of sustainable development of the AE field, and urban plans of cities in general. Introducing sustainable design in the AE courses with a different level of implementation is crucial and could also contribute to building efficiency all over the world. According to a study at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, the introduction to such courses prepares the students to work in careers in sustainable development. In this program, the institution connects to the local community and the students try to solve real-world problems. This integration happens on two levels, the first within the curriculum of the university, and the second in the larger scale community and industry [7].

2 Methodology

As mentioned, the Arch 302 introductory course was introduced in the spring of 2018 based on AE program assessment and continuous improvement. After eight semesters of teaching the course between the classroom environment and the online format, reflection is needed to assess how this course is contributing to enhancing students’ performance and perception of the AE discipline. For this, the instructors’ observations, regular course assessments, and the inclusion of students’ opinion were carried out. A survey was designed to find out how this new course has facilitated the overall understanding of the AE discipline. It was structured to collect details on the main four themes regarding students’ perception of the introduced course, the impact of it on their skills and communication, their curiosity about knowledge and engagement, and the ways in which hands-on teaching approach is perceived. The survey was distributed after six semesters of teaching the course. To allow for a better understanding of the impact of this course from the students’ perspective, the collected sample included two groups of AE students, those who have finished Arch 302 and those who have not taken Arch 302. The survey outcomes revealed that AE students who have finished the introductory course require less time to develop the conceptualization of the design projects; they are able to explain and articulate the context analysis and easily perform individually and in groups. Interestingly, many students mentioned that they encouraged their fellows to apply to AE after taking Arch 302. The fact that it does not have any prerequisites makes it lighter and more appealing. The course has contributed to gradually building the students’ basic skills and made them able to deal with technology and needed software to apply and master in the subsequent courses. The gradual build up approach and the segmentation of the applied coursework were customized to meet the various students’ levels.

2.1 Survey

As mentioned, an online survey was designed and distributed to investigate the impact on the student understanding of the interdisciplinary nature of the AE, and the subsequent design and building construction courses. The included questions were structured to evaluate the interrelationships of ARCH 302 with other courses aligned with the achievement of the course learning outcomes, especially in basic design skills and formal visual principles. Based on the methods discussed by Oppenheim [9], the survey is designed following the stages of identifying the questions to be answered, generating questions, testing and altering the questions as necessary, distribution of the questionnaire, collection of responses, and analysis of data. The participants were 90 AE students who took the course in different semesters. The survey was anonymous to improve response rates and minimize ethical issues associated with data protection. It was built using online survey software called SurveyMonkey (2011), which was also used for distribution and response collection. The software increases the efficiency of the process, by storing the responses automatically and improving accuracy by eliminating the risk of transcription errors.

The research applied a mixed-method approach. For the quantitative part of the survey, 65 responses were received, whereas 32 responses were received for the qualitative part. According to Creswell (2013), sufficient saturation was achieved within the number of responses typically ranging from 20 to 30 participants as the sample size of qualitative research, which was applied in this study. Quantitative and qualitative data were collected from the survey, in this study, the qualitative results of the survey were used to explore students’ perspectives on the outcomes of the ARCH 302 and their educational experience. A qualitative method was applied in this study, to address research problems to fill a gap in the literature where the researchers need to learn more from participants through exploration (Creswell, 2013). In the current study, data were collected by using an electronic questionnaire divided into two parts: the first part contained 20 required multiple choice and checkboxes questions to provide quantitative data, whereas the second part contained four optional open-ended questions to elicit information regarding experiences in ARCH 302. The texts of the four open-ended questions were structured to capture specific comments about Arch 302 in relation to areas of basic skills achievement; basic understanding of design process; basic understanding of engineering system integration; and communication and presentation skills. The open-ended questions were structured to collect students’ inputs on areas related to student perception and comprehension of AE’s interdisciplinary nature.

Many researchers used open-ended questionnaires as a tool to conduct qualitative studies (Orme, 2013). In this study, the results of the four open-ended questions in the survey were used as qualitative data. For the qualitative data analysis, sequential steps were followed, from the specific to the general, and involving multiple levels of analysis (Creswell, 2013):

Step 1::

organize and prepare the data for analysis.

Step 2::

read or look at all the data.

Step 3::

start coding all the data.

Step 4::

generate a description and themes

Step 5::

representing the description and themes

In the coding process, the participants’ comments were organized into categories and labeled to generate descriptions and themes, that validate the findings (Anderson, 2007). In the discussion and results section of this paper, codes from participants’ comments demonstrate the qualitative interpretation of responses and generated codes and themes. Considering that qualitative analysis is characterized by subjectivity, the findings will indicate not only the data, but also their frequency, thus supporting their validity and reliability.

2.2 Course Proposal

The course was proposed based on the AE curriculum assessment and the observed weakness in students’ performance in terms of skills, tools, and communication. Based on benchmarking the program with other similar international programs, a proposal was developed and submitted to the university curriculum committee for approval. The course was approved and included in the AE program in Spring 2018. Since then, the course has evolved in multiple cycles of improvement, as explained in the next section.

2.3 Course Evolution

In the first three semesters of offering, the Arch 302 course has been assessed in terms of level of challenge, assignments and exercises contents, weight distributions, and projects. It was also evaluated to make sure it is linked with other basic courses such as building construction and the AE curriculum in general, as shown in Fig. 1. The fact that the course is based on hands-on teaching requires more integration of small problems to train the student to think independently while developing their knowledge and skills. This has contributed to enhancing not only the course content but also the delivery and inclusion of tools and basic skills. The course is taught in a studio format with mini lectures to introduce preliminary information on design concepts, site analysis, drawing techniques and projects, presentation skills and communication.

Fig. 1

The relation of Arch 302 with the other courses in the AE curriculum. Source, Rashed AlShaali

3 Best Practice

Regular course assessment is required by the UAEU system and ABET accreditation each semester. Accordingly, any changes in course syllabus are performed based on a systematic and thorough evaluation that includes student work, student feedback, faculty proposals, and other relevant criteria. The Arch 302 course has gone through multiple changes based on the evaluation outcomes, which were reflected on the course content, exercises, assignments, and the final projects to better familiarize students with the AE field and gradually build their skills. The presented case studies show two examples of the assigned final projects in different semesters. The project in both cases was an Exhibition Hall within the campus to reflect the EXPO 2020 theme. The sustainable elements of both projects were: increase of shading structures, recycled materials, and more openings on the north side rather than south. The project was divided into three main requirements: site analysis and the concepts, the case study analysis, and the project development. The site analysis enabled the students to understand the relevance of the location within the country, within the city and then the neighborhood. The SWOT analysis defined the advantages and disadvantages of each site to help the student develop a more practical idea.

As shown in Fig. 2, the first case reflects the invested effort into the design analysis of the project from Fall 2019 in the conventional face-to-face teaching and the second case study belongs to the online offering in spring 2020. Obviously, the students presented more alternatives by sketches or by using Revit and Sketchup tools, while alternatives were limited in the second case. However, the second case shows clearer organization and better function distribution of the project. In the Concept development, the students were asked to work on two alternatives and based on critical thinking to select one that is better integrating the requirements and to the location. The case studies helped the students understand how the function is distributed in the plan, how each zone interacts with the other, the scale of the project, the elevations and sections, the 3D development, and the material selection etch. The project development then starts with the site location, the functional plan, section and elevations, 3D, and interiors. The students were encouraged to add the structural system to the plan to apply and connect with other corequisite building construction course, as part of the course objectives. The analysis of the site helped the students in considering the contextual and environmental elements to achieve sustainability projects, as an overarching concept. A similar pattern is observed in Figs. 2, 3 and 4.

Fig. 2

Site analysis and concept development

Fig. 3

Case study analysis phases

Fig. 4

Project development phase

4 Remote Teaching

Due to the pandemic worldwide, the UAE University decided to shift to remote teaching model for the remaining time of the spring/summer semester of 2020. The various challenges of online teaching were witnessed in areas related to design concept explanation; teaching design tools; individual work and teamwork; and presentations. Therefore, additional tablets devices were provided by the UAE University, based on the instructors’ request, to fill in the gap and provide alternative to class environment by sharing screen to work on one-to-one with the students.

The first phase of the project is the design concept. The conventional face-to-face teaching enables the faculty to closely interact with each student. In the remote system, this interaction became more challenging, and the explanation of sketches and geometry was complex and required longer time and alternative approach. Furthermore, teaching Revit online was a learning process. In conventional teaching, the students would be more flexible with the class assignments. While in online teaching, the same task would take more time. In the physical class, due to the interaction between the students, the learning of the tool would be more practical, meanwhile in online class, the individual work of each student is relevant. The individual work was slightly more productive in the online teaching based on the final project results, as discussed in the above Sect. 3. Moreover, the teamwork was a little complicated, especially in the assessment of each student’s contribution and amount of effort in each task.

However, the individual and teamwork would be evaluated and compared in the submitted files through the system and through the online presentations. The presentations of the individual tasks and the final project helped the student have a better terminology in the field of architecture and build a strong ethic. The integration of face-to-face classes with the remote teaching, as later applied by the UAE University after securing safe environment and vaccination, was applied in Fall 2020 to assist the students in comprehending practical skills such as critical/design thinking, sketching, understanding the site, and developing a concept. The earlier stage of the term project was done in the face-to-face sessions and the advanced stage was done by remote teaching. Additional remote sessions were considered to assist the students in learning the design tools (in this case REVIT), as shown in some examples on student term project, graded A, in Figs. 5, 6, 7 and 8, for illustration purposes the concept page and the final page will be shown.

Fig. 5

Site plan and concept development

Fig. 6

Project A 3D

Fig. 7

Concept development and inspiration

Fig. 8

Project B 3D

The introductory course has improved in adapting and maintaining the balance between architectural and engineering courses, as verified in the results of each semester assessment. The exercises and assignments are designed to help the students understand the basics of the AE Program. To keep up with the continuous improvement, a detailed assessment report is done at the end of each semester to take the needed based on the evaluation of the course learning outcomes. More examples of student work over different semesters are shown in Figs. 5, 6, 7 and 8. As per the UAEU assessement requirement LOAMs, the course is assessed every semester based on collecting the involved instructors inputs and the students survey. However, the improvement is a continuous process and a work in progress to further strengthen the course content and teaching tools.

5 Results and Discussion

As verified in the collected survey, the course outcomes meet both the AE program and the student’s expectations. The survey shows that further integration with the construction aspects of the buildings is needed to confirm the alignment of basic courses at earlier stages of the curriculum. Therefore, the specialized clusters, as per the interdisciplinary focus of the AE program, are considering joint assignments that include components of each area. The survey outcomes were insightful in terms of the applied tools taught; however, the speed change of such tools requires continuous update as per the industry demand. Approximately, 85% of the students who participated in the survey confirmed that the course has been informative and inspiring to get them more engaged and interested in the AE discipline. This also makes them more aware of the relevant industry and the specialized technology. While online teaching opens opportunities of diverse teaching and more inclusion of software, it also imposed certain limitations on the full implementation of the hands-on teaching. Therefore, the integration of additional platforms such as Miro helps in overcoming such unavoidable pandemic challenge.

6 Conclusion

The course has been proved informative and continues to attract students to the AE discipline. Fundamentally, the course continues to go through cycles of continuous improvement to further strengthening the course content, teaching tools, and technology in relation to industry. For this, the multiple offered exercises and assignments are always assessed to keep this course actively engaging. The several meetings and discussions of all engaged faculty who have taught the course keep the course alive and maintain the level of content simplified and updated to meet the expected benefits of its creation. Therefore, the introductory courses are essential elements to consider simplifying the complexity of the AE interdisciplinary field. Such courses bring life to the classroom environment and the student community in general, and prepare them to handle the gradual development of their skills and future professions.