Reflection Blog, Shuyuan Zhang

My feeling to this class is it is different from other classes I am taking or took after junior level. Most of the classes for seniors and juniors are introducing solid techniques. They are more focusing on understanding, memorizing and practicing. But AE-410 is designed as a class of thinking. I feel that your role for this class is more about leading our thoughts instead of telling us what or how to do. With this approach, I feel more comfortable with these topics and find my interests on some of the topics. I am also gaining a general idea view of the structure of intelligent building. I believe if we approach these topic in the other way, we will start with knowing some specific parts of intelligent building well and then compose these parts together to have an overall view of the field. But the problem is we have to dig deep enough of those parts before we get there. So personally speaking, the design of this class is more beneficial to me at least in the current stage. Other than the general thing discussed above, I learned new knowledge from different perspective from different assignments of this class. I will talk about them in the sequence and as the section we did during the last ten weeks.

1.       BIM

Before I took this class, I think BIM is a nice tool and becoming popular in this field. But I didn’t know that it is already the basic skill for new generation of civil engineers. After taking the guest lecturer’s presentation, I reconsidered its value and importance and decided to dig further about it.

For your assignment, I started with following your video tutorial to create a model in Revit as a no-experienced user of this software. Everything for this assignment is new to me. I have to watch a lot of videos on YouTube and I explored some of the tools that does not shown on the assignment requirements. Although this assignment was hard for me, I gained valuable experience and knowledge from it and I regard this as a good start.

2.       Database

Kind of similar to BIM, I knew it is useful but I didn’t realize how useful it is. We can expect in the near future; every part of the whole civilization will have their own database and these databases are dependent on and joint to each other. This also means knowing these knowledges will benefit to my career.

For the database assignment, as I mentioned in database experience essay, it helped me understand theory I am learning from INFO 210 and I found some of the tools are so helpful that can achieve some functions are impossible or extremely hard to be done in Oracle SQL developer. I can learn more by knowing both of the procedural (SQL) and non-procedural (Access) database development tools.

Comments

1.       Jianfeng Xiao

I agree with you that this class is a good experience that we rarely have from previous class. I also believe that the combination of introducing theory and practicing makes us understand the topic easily. We have the same feeling about the increasing of the importance of BIM as well.

2.       Marino

I am taking INFO 210 as you as well. I agree when you say that the database assignment deeper our understanding in database relationship between 1 to many better. This is exactly how I felt in my reflection paper.

3.       Thomas

Your attitude to database is interesting. I kind of having the same feeling for BIM. I hope I could steer away from it for the rest of my life. But I don’t think it is possible for me to do it as a civil engineer.