Teaching BIM and Its Impact on Young Professionals

This paper reports a 6-year experience teaching building information modeling (BIM) methodology in the undergraduate/graduate architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) program at the Pontificia Universidade Catolica do Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio), Brazil. This work is part of the long-term goal of developing a new BIM AEC-based curriculum track for engineering and architecture students at this university. The paper also reports the results of a survey on the student’s perception on how this knowledge has affected their way of working with other disciplines and how it has influenced their professional lives. The adopted approach involved theoretical lectures, computer laboratory practice, student oral presentations, and the complete project of an enterprise. The lectures delivered by specialists with practical experience in the subject exposed the students to BIM concepts. In the laboratory, students were trained in the software tools that enables BIM activity. To develop the project, multidisciplinary teams of students were formed and each team was challenged to emulate the change in process that BIM implies. The task was to develop the complete project of an enterprise considering all different specialties involved in its design, detailing, and planning. More specifically, these specialties consisted of architecture, structural engineering, mechanical and electrical systems, and BIM management. The teams made oral presentations to the client (the professor) and consultants roughly on a weekly basis. In each year, the students´ performance was evaluated in several ways. In particular, a 360° evaluation tool was used, which was crucial to provide feedback to each team member during the exercise. The culmination of this experience is the elaboration of this article that aims to describe the challenges and the successes of the adopted approach.