Teaching Building Information Modeling as an Integral Part of Freshman Year Civil Engineering Education

Lack of personnel with Building Information Modeling (BIM) skills is a significant constraint retarding use of the technology in the architecture, engineering, and construction industry. Unless BIM is introduced into undergraduate civil engineering curricula in a fundamental way, graduate civil engineers will lack the skills needed to serve a construction industry in which three-dimensional models are the main medium for expression and communication of design intent and the basis for engineering analysis. A mandatory freshman year course titled “Communicating Engineering Information,” which teaches both theoretical and practical aspects of BIM, has been developed to replace the traditional engineering graphics course at the Technion. The main lesson learned through four semesters of teaching the class is that students find BIM tools intuitive and therefore relatively easy to learn; the majority of lecture hours are now devoted to the conceptual aspects of BIM and the principles for preparing models that can be analyzed in multiple ways. BIM can and should be taught in its own right, and not as an extension to computer-aided drawing. The skills students have been able to bring to bear in design courses later in their university education indicate that the approach is sound and will enable graduates to meet the needs of the civil engineering profession in the “BIM age.”