Learning Construction Complexity by Visualizing Cases

Students in construction engineering and management need to develop good understanding about the complexity of construction processes, including the structural behavior of buildings in their partial configurations, and the latent and stochastic effect of decision-making during construction. Such understanding helps them to properly select construction methods and operations to ensure successful execution of a construction project. Cases of failures can reveal the dynamic interactive relationships between design and construction. The authors explored using computer animation and visualization of failure cases to help construction engineering and management students develop a better understanding of the spatial and temporal complexity. In this study, a learning environment, called Case-base Active Knowledge Environment, is presented by using a case about a high-rise residential building. The case shows that the building collapsed due to many factors, such as improper construction sequence, poor selection of staging areas, bad weather, and the lack of shoring of foundation walls. Through this case, computer animation illustrated the interactions of elements of different systems, including building, nature and social-economic systems, and how and why the interactions eventually led to a failure. To better understand the complexity of construction systems, information that was illustrated by animation was organized based on the structure-behavior-function theory and discrete event modeling. The discussion in this paper is limited to the design of the learning environment. Validations of the learning environment will be conducted in a future study concerning its effectiveness to support learning needs.