Encouraging Computational Skills: Evaluating BIM Course to Support Design Studio

Abstract

—Architectural education curricula are inevitably facing the challenge to lead and stay relevant to the expanding territory in architecture, engineering, and construction industries. The design studio, as a capstone of this education system, now meets the rise of computational tools in every aspect of the design process. The question arises on the method to incorporate the increasing development of computational tools into a systematic structure in the curricula that supports and enhance the design and its delivery. This study reports an analysis of the evaluation of five years of implementation of BIM-related courses in the undergraduate study planned to support the use of computational tools for the design studio at the School of Architecture, Planning and Policy Development, Institut Teknologi Bandung. This paper is concerned with the pedagogical approaches and content of teaching materials concerning limitations and constraints given by the curriculum structure. Using content analysis from course evaluation forms and interviews with the students, we analyze and suggest that the essential skills development necessary for the undergraduate level is modeling and documentation of design intent. The pragmatic approach that focuses on those two factors has benefit for design studio projects particularly on specific project typology with varied repetition components and less articulated form. However, our study also found that introducing BIM courses at 2 nd year of the undergraduate program was less useful since it required a proper understanding of additional and technical knowledge of building materials, construction, and others. On the other hand, to tackle the great subjects of BIM, we employ a blended-learning system where we provided curated online tutorials into each of the BIM topics as complementary teaching materials. By this strategy, we optimize learning outcomes while minimizing the effort to pack a wide range of BIM subjects into teaching materials. Based on our findings, the value of computational BIM, therefore, lied on the comprehensive understanding of modeling design intent and integrated method for design delivery that we argue are essential for students entering the workforce. Furthermore, teaching computational through BIM to support design studio milieu students where it encourages students to learn by their peers and various source materials that allowing them to expand their skills across platforms. We presented a detailed description and analysis of the course and outcomes, teaching agenda, student projects, feedbacks, findings, and discussion in the paper.