This past fall I spent some time speaking to several colleges in Texas about including
Acrobat 3D in their engineering labs so that students could take advantage of being able to convert their 3D projects into a pdf format that could be shared with anyone with the FREE Adobe Reader. I thought it would be a good way of students being able to communicate with their other colleagues and professors, but also be able to take their models or projects with them and still be able to view and share them without having the native software. I was very surprised in the response from department heads in that most told me in one form or another that "we teach principles, we don't teach technology!" It was not that we were asking them have a course on Acrobat 3D just the ability for students to simply drag and drop models into Acrobat and convert them into a pdf document that gave them 100x compression and the ability to share with others. Most understood the value proposition, but then there was one university that just stood out from the rest and that was
Texas State University.
By the time we visited with Texas State, they not only understood the value, they were already using it in their curriculum. The longer the meeting went the more fascinated I became with their program. The course that they are providing to their undergraduates is centered around BIM (Building Information Modeling). It is a junior/senior level interdisciplinary course that is built on a design-build premise whereby the students design, model and cost commercial projects. The best part is that these are Real Projects for Real Customers. They are given the responsibilities of managing the client, budget, schedule and constraints that you would normally face on a project. BIM is an integral part of the approach in that it supports not only the design-build model but interdisciplinary teamwork as well. In meeting and talking with Chris Tinsel he was able to share some of the positive outcomes they experienced from the program as a whole:
- Created a new delivery system whereby an owner or developer (client) work with our university program for fundamental programming/schematic design.
- A "Living Laboratory" that allows our program to work directly with industry to create "bridging documents" (those documents that non-licensed designers might create).
- Course work infused with ongoing research in BIM, design-build project management, and construction/digital fabrication methods.
I have thoroughly enjoyed meeting with Chris and team surrounding these efforts. I can not tell you how impressed I am with not only the course but the efforts made to improve the industry and further drive the BIM initiatives. In my previous post I talked about some of the ISO 15926 presentations and how we often the focus on the technology versus the process. I think this is a good example whereby they are focused on the process and using the technology to execute. The level of experience these students will have coming out into the workforce should make them a very strong candidate with potential employers. Most firms are struggling to even get started with BIM, and these students will have already completed a BIM project.
As for Acrobat 3D, it is being used just as I had described above. It gives the students, colleagues, professors and clients an easy way to be able to exchange the project information and model in the form of a pdf document. They can share and collaborate on it with anyone who has the FREE Adobe Reader that is already installed on 89% of PC's.
If you are at Texas State University or considering your college options, this is definitely a course to consider.
Have fun,
Jonathan