Garden City—A Virtual City for Undergraduates

Abstract

The Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE) at Rowan University (RU), with support from NSF and Rowan, will adopt “Sooner City”, a virtual city developed by the School of Civil Engineering and Environmental Science at the University of Oklahoma (OU). A more portable version of Sooner City will be created, to ease adoption by other institutions. To be named “Garden City” at Rowan, it will be used in the CEE-RU undergraduate program. Garden City will provide design throughout the curriculum, with design projects extending over multiple classes and years. Undergraduates will go to the Garden City website to obtain assignments, data and design criteria for homework and projects. They will also be able to store their projects and designs in the city, allowing them to record their accomplishments and easily refer to them when needed for future assignment. Finally, the Garden City website will provide a central location for course webpages, tutorials, etc. Faculty will use Garden City to demonstrate the context (i.e., human communities) of many civil engineering projects. The purpose of this paper is to provide detail on the Garden City project, including how other institutions can adopt it. A multi-class and year project developed at RU is also described.