ENGAGING AUGMENTED REALITY TO INTRODUCE CIVIL ENGINEERING SITE AND GRADING PLANS TO UNDERGRADUATE STUDENTS

Teaching blueprint reading for use in construction management is a complex process. The layers of information involved with a single drawing can be daunting to students who have never attempted to simplify and extract specific data from the document. This is ever more apparent when dealing with blueprints related to civil engineering such as site plans detailing grade changes, topography and cut and fill requirements. Lifting a 2-dimensional drawing into 3-dimensions to visualize the site is a learned skill which must be practiced consistently. In order to assist with the learning curve related to this task, the use of an augmented reality sandbox was introduced into a freshman undergraduate course at Wentworth Institute of Technology (WIT) for Construction Management (CM) students. The introduction of this technology allowed students to overlay specific site topography from a digital site plan onto a physical sandbox in order to model and generate existing topographic conditions. Following this activity, the students were challenged with identifying the proposed site conditions from the civil engineering drawings, in order to resurface the sandbox to match these conditions. Once the proposed conditions were in place, the students were then engaged in introductory cut and fill calculations to discover the estimated amount of sand that was either added or removed from the existing conditions to achieve the final design state. In order to understand the impacts of this process, a survey was engaged to measure student's retention of knowledge related to civil engineering site plans and topographic maps. The students were presented an overview of the information in a standard lecture period through the medium of a typical PowerPoint presentation and then asked to provide responses to the survey. Following this initial survey process, the students engaged in the augmented reality sandbox activity and were provided the same survey upon completion. This paper presents the results and findings of this survey and introduces the next steps in utilizing augmented reality technology to assist in the teaching of blueprint reading for construction management students, at the undergraduate level.