Undergraduate Civil Engineering Students Research Articles

Augmented Reality for the Development and Reinforcement of Spatial Skills: A Case Applied to Civil Engineering Students

The architecture, engineering, construction, and operation (AECO) industry has brought transformations within the field. Despite the changes, traditional teaching methods such as analyzing two-dimensional plans and models are still being used in training processes, which do not effectively promote the development of spatial skills. In this context, augmented reality (AR) can be used as a tool to translate two-dimensional information into three-dimensional space. Thus, the present study explores the use of the VT-Platform AR tool to develop and reinforce spatial skills among undergraduate civil engineering students. The study follows a quantitative approach with a descriptive scope and an experimental design. Students in the sanitary engineering subject were divided into two groups: an experimental group and a control group. A short-term teaching-learning methodology was proposed for the experimental group using the VT-Platform AR tool. Both groups took the differential aptitude test (DAT) to measure their spatial skills. The experimental group showed a higher average score compared to the control group, with a difference of 29.8%. Furthermore, the use of the VT-Platform AR tool helped standardize the level of spatial skills within the experimental group. It was concluded that using the VT-Platform AR tool can effectively develop and reinforce spatial skills among students.

An international initiative on geosynthetic education

An international educational initiative to facilitate the exposure of geosynthetics to undergraduate civil engineering students has been conducted by the International Geosynthetics Society (IGS) for over a decade. Geosynthetics is a comparatively new topic within geotechnical engineering and, consequently, has only been sporadically introduced into undergraduate Civil Engineering curricula. In particular, geotechnical engineering professors themselves may have not been exposed to the basics of geosynthetics to be able to comfortably transfer such knowledge to their students. As part of this educational program, civil engineering professors are invited to take a course on geosynthetics, for which they receive fellowships covering their expenses. The course also includes complementary components such as a workshop consisting of practical demonstrations, pedagogical material, and technical documents. Implementation of the program involves multiple parties, including the IGS, its national chapters, and geosynthetics industry, who are allotted the responsibilities of supporting the program instructors, offering practical project-oriented input. This paper describes the course structure, the educational tools employed, the impact on the program caused by the pandemic, and results from feedback surveys that assessed how the knowledge on geosynthetics acquired by the participants was transferred to their students in terms of new courses on geosynthetics, inclusion of geosynthetics topics in existing undergraduate disciplines, etc. Emphasis is given on the experience of the Brazilian Chapter of IGS, which has already conducted programs. The educational outcomes of the programs currently offered are being evaluated and they suggest excellent acceptance of the course by participants and undergraduate students at the universities.

Cognitive Outcome Attainment of The Undergraduate Civil Engineering Students before and During COVID-19

This paper describes the performance of cognitive outcomes attainment of the undergraduate diploma in civil engineering students at Universiti Teknologi MARA (UiTM), Johor Branch, Pasir Gudang Campus. Specifically, this study examined the different cognitive outcomes attained among this population from before until during the implementation of the Movement Control Order (MCO) starting in the March 2020 semester. The study utilised data from the Programme Outcomes (POs) analysis by the Outcomes Based Education Committee every semester. This study identified different cognitive outcome attainments both before and during the COVID-19 semesters among students. The attainments used for the students are based on the Averaging Model, in which all courses contributing to the achievements are considered in the calculation of the cognitive outcomes average. The increase in percentages recorded from the result indicates that the shift to online learning has a useful effect on students’ performances in cognitive attribution. Findings also show that some assessment grades, such as assignments, quizzes, and tests during COVID-19 semesters, can possibly improve greater achievements in cognitive level among students. The study discusses the implementation and functional descriptions of the findings and how they would be beneficial to stakeholders.

The Integration of Digital Techniques in Engineering Education: A Case Study to Evaluate Student’s Motivation and Performance

The importance of a paradigm shift in the current traditional teaching strategies is becoming of high importance. Integrating disruptive technologies into undergraduate civil engineering students can improve their performance and motivation levels. Students were assessed on their ability to identify mistakes in a concrete design developed using Autodesk Revit®. The students were divided into three different groups and assessed using three different media: 2 dimensional plans (2D), 3 dimensional models (3D) and virtual reality (VR). The results have shown that 3D and VR students managed to score 54.9% and 62.5% respectively. 2D students scored 20.5%. This shows a substantial difference between VR and 3D relative to the 2D group. From the surveys conducted, it was also perceived that students found 3D and VR methods more motivating than the 2D traditional method. Spearman correlation also indicated a positive and medium to strong correlation between the level of motivation and performance of VR students. The results show that VR is a valid alternative to conventional methods of teaching. This study is part of an ongoing research effort related to utilization of VR in engineering education.

Civil engineering students’ perceptions of emergency remote teaching: a case study in New Zealand

ABSTRACT University of Canterbury, as an institution, had developed strong educational resilience during and after the 2010–11 earthquakes. Due to the Coronavirus pandemic, New Zealand shut down all university educational facilities in March 2020, with education migrated online. Within this unique context, this research aims to (1) investigate civil engineering students’ perceptions about the benefits and challenges of online learning during the lockdown period, (2) identify significant factors that contribute to effective online teaching and learning, and (3) provide the implications of this research for future emergency remote teaching (ERT). A survey was designed and administered to measure students’ perceptions of online learning during the lockdown. A total of 192 completed responses were collected from both undergraduate and Master civil engineering students. In addition to typical online learning challenges, students also experienced unique challenges, such as social and emotional isolation, anxiety, depression, and uncertainty. This paper suggests that teaching presence be brought to the forefront of ERT. Future research directions were recommended to better understand ERT by linking it to the Community of Inquiry framework and enhance tertiary education institutions’ resilience to handle a future crisis.

Hydraulic engineering analysis of Roman water infrastructure: a review of practice and possibilities

A short review is presented covering English-language publications where quantitative engineering analysis has been used to study and gain insight into how ancient Roman and Mediterranean water systems functioned. The review covers work on using technical engineering perspectives to try and understand the geometrical layout of water systems, quantitative work of a type readily accomplished by undergraduate civil engineering students, such as calculating the flow capacity of aqueducts and other conduits of known dimensions, and more involved studies using computational techniques usually applied by specialist engineers in research or industry. It is concluded that the many different levels of analyses employed have given insight into how Roman water systems worked, for example the amount of water they delivered, and the kinds of issues their designers and operators might have faced. It is hoped that this review will inspire further interdisciplinary study in Archaeohydrology, using modern engineering techniques to amplify and extend the story of Roman water systems told by archaeologists.

Impact of lived experiences of people with disabilities in the built environment in South Africa.

BackgroundIn spite of legislations and policies to ensure an inclusive society in South Africa for the accommodation of people with disabilities, there are reports that they still struggle to move freely within society.ObjectivesAs part of a larger qualitative exploratory study on the preparation of undergraduate civil engineering students in a local university to contribute to the development of an inclusive society, this article seeks to understand the impact of the lived experiences of people with disabilities in their interaction with the built environment.MethodFour persons with disabilities, considered to be knowledgeable about South African legislations relating to disability, were purposely selected to each share one specific experience whilst interacting with the built environment. The transcribed texts of the interviews were analysed by using the phenomenological–hermeneutic method.ResultsThe participants exhibited strong desires to participate in society. However, the sense of loss of control and independence as they encountered challenges in the built environment changed the euphoria to disempowerment, rejection, anger and despondency. In spite of their experiences, participants expressed a commitment towards overcoming the challenges encountered in the broader interest of people with disabilities.ConclusionA deeper understanding of the impact of the experiences of people with disabilities when they participate within the built environment in South Africa revealed a broad spectrum of negative emotions, which may impact the quality of life and well-being of the participants.

Outcomes from applying the inverted classroom to a first-year structures module

The Institution of Structural Engineers has recently invested considerable effort in the thorny problem of how to improve understanding of structural behaviour among undergraduate students. This paper, based on a winning entry to the Institution’s Excellence in Structural Engineering Education Award 2015, provides an account of action research in the application of inverted classroom principles to teaching first-year undergraduate civil engineering students, which was undertaken as a response to disappointing academic performance of the 2012/13 cohort. The process was based around a virtual learning environment. The effect upon engagement was better than expected, and demonstrated that it is possible to engineer enhanced performance by increasing student interaction with a virtual learning environment in conjunction with a structured learning schedule.

Vocational Personality Types in College Engineering Students in Relation to Academic Achievement

This study explored whether and to what extent vocational personality types based on Holland (1994) correlate with and explain unique variance of academic success among 117 undergraduate civil engineering students by using the Self‐Directed Search–Form R, 4th Edition. Findings indicated that the majority of participants’ 1st‐letter code was Realistic (39.3%), 2nd‐letter code was Investigative (24.8%), and 3rd‐letter code was Social (21.4%), compared with Holland's 3‐letter codes for civil engineering (Investigative, Realistic, Enterprising). The study also calculated the degree of congruence between personality type and occupational environment. For career counselors, the findings underscore the importance of using congruence scores to predict engineering students’ academic performance.

Exploring student disability and professional identity: navigating sociocultural expectations in U.S. undergraduate civil engineering programs

ABSTRACT National agencies throughout Australia and the United States (U.S.) have called for broadened participation in engineering, including participation by individuals with disabilities. However, studies demonstrate that students with disabilities are not effectively supported by university systems and cultures. This lack of support can shape how students form professional identities as they move through school and into careers. To better understand these experiences and create a more inclusive environment in engineering, we conducted a constructivist grounded theory exploration of professional identity formation in students who identify as having a disability as they study civil engineering and experience their first year of work. We conducted semi-structured interviews with 24 undergraduate civil engineering students across the U.S. and analysed them using grounded theory techniques. Navigating sociocultural expectations of disability emerged as one key theme, consisting of three strategy types: (1) neutrally satisfying expectations, (2) challenging expectations, and (3) aligning with expectations. Regardless of strategy, all participants navigated sociocultural expectations related to their studies and their disabilities. This theme highlights the ways sociocultural influences impact students’ navigation through their undergraduate civil engineering careers. These findings can be used to examine cultural barriers faced by students with disabilities to enhance their inclusion in engineering.

Not Just an Academic Exercise: Systems Thinking Applied to Designing Safer Alternatives

For the last seven years, an interdisciplinary course known as Greener Solutions, offered by the University of California, Berkeley Center for Green Chemistry, has brought together graduate students in chemistry, environmental health, and engineering to understand each other’s disciplines, and to work together to develop safer alternatives to hazardous chemicals and manufacturing processes. Through the course, interdisciplinary teams of UC Berkeley students have worked with partner organizations to identify safer alternatives to chemicals of concern, including investigating safer preservatives in personal care products, nonfluorinated durable water-repellant coatings for outerwear, and safer cross-linkers to replace formaldehyde in permanent press textiles and diisocyanates in spray polyurethane foam insulation. Students undertake a bioinspired design process and then assess the potential health and environmental hazards associated with each of their proposed alternatives relative to hazards of the current chemistries. The students generate a focused alternatives assessment that considers technical performance, relative hazard and exposure potential, and feasibility, creating an “opportunity map” for the partner company and, ideally, the industry sector as a whole. The Greener Solutions model for interdisciplinary, inquiry-based learning is training a new generation of chemists and engineers in a systems approach to design: one that more fully considers the health and environmental implications of chemical and material choices. An adaptation of the Greener Solutions course model to serve undergraduate civil engineering students at University of Victoria, B.C. demonstrates how the course elements can serve a different subject matter and instructional level.

Bond the Gap between Academic and Industry Requirements for Undergraduate Civil Engineering Students in Iraq

In the last twenty years, civil engineering industry has been improved significantly due to the expanded use of technology and innovations in project management. This progress represented as a challenge to universities to provide competence engineers with the right capabilities to be fit in the new job requirements and able to lead this industry to the new era. As this problem considered a global issue, it has a particular situation in Iraq. This resulted from the sharp change in the Iraqi construction industry after recent political change in 2003. This study aims to investigate the current industry expectation from graduated civil engineers and compare it with actual competences that engineers learned from their study in Iraqi universities. This research implements both a qualitative and quantitative approach to collect valuable and reliable data. This has been achieved by sending an online questionnaire to senior engineers working for both public and private organizations. In addition, another set of questions send to students to evaluate their knowledge to identify the gap. This study identified a considerable gap between current civil engineering education and industry expectation, which mainly resulted in project management skills. This gap needs to be addressed in the near future to make sure that Iraqi civil engineers maintain their chances to get hired from foreign companies and be able to lead the Iraqi construction industry to the global market.

PREREQUISITE EVALUATION OF ENGINEERING SKILLS

Preliminary findings obtained from a three-year study are presented where different cohorts of undergraduate civil engineering students are followed for three consecutive years while completing the Civil Engineering program at the Université de Moncton. This study outlines how a set of problem instances were developed, wherein a student performs a series of steps to formulate a solution. These steps are mapped to one or more skills, also known as procedural knowledge components, which are essential for students to have mastered from one or more previous courses in order to successfully complete the course in question. Over a hundred students from the second, third, or fourth year performed a series of problem-solving tasks that assess a common set of skills at the beginning of their respected courses. The findings obtained from the first year of this study show that students vary in their abilities to correctly solve instances of a problem on their first attempt. This suggests that there is a pressing need for assessment tools that target progressions for specific courses using the range of standards outlined by the Canadian Engineering Accreditation Board as progress indicators while providing individualized instructional modules developed on the basis of research-based understanding of how these skills develop over time for all students.

Particle Roundness and Sphericity from Images of Assemblies by Chart Estimates and Computer Methods

AbstractSoil particle roundness (R) and sphericity (S) are two important intrinsic properties that govern a soil’s mechanical behavior. Although R and S have well-established mathematical definitions dating back to the 1930s, the values are much more typically estimated using charts developed in the 1940s and 1950s. The charts, are based on the earlier mathematical definitions. Using these charts, a class of undergraduate civil engineering students at the University of Michigan were asked to estimate (Rc and Sc) from images of twenty geologically and geographically diverse sands spanning a range of actual R and S values. The images were of three-dimensional (3D) assemblies of the sands as they would be found in images taken remotely or in situ. The students’ estimates were statistically analyzed and compared with rigorously determined R and S using a recently developed computational geometry algorithm. Overall, the students’ estimates were scattered, particularly for natural sands exhibiting intermediate ...

Mentoring undergraduate civil engineering students

On enrolment at university, undergraduate civil engineering students begin their journey towards a professional career. Associating with graduate engineers throughout their studies provides students with potential role models and assists them to accustomise progressively to the industry. While the procurement of guest practitioners to deliver workshops and lectures remains buoyant, opportunities for students to secure summer placements within the civil engineering sector has been problematic since the 2008 financial crisis. Graduate mentoring of student mentees can help to bridge the shortage of vocational placements. This paper discusses the results from a graduate mentoring initiative involving third-year (N = 345) civil and environmental engineering student mentees, 83 graduate mentors and 31 employers. The results show that the student mentees overwhelmingly support and validate the opportunities that this initiative has provided. On completion of their mentoring meetings, and on return to the fourth year of their studies, the majority of the students commit to making behavioural and attitudinal changes regarding their own continued professional development.

Learning Styles of Undergraduate Civil Engineering Students and the Relationship with Construction Management Success

AbstractLearning ability is one of the most distinctive characteristics that make humans social creatures. Numerous research has found that individuals learn in different ways, so every student has a different, individual learning style. The more instructors understand the learning differences of their students, the better their chances of success in civil engineering education. Therefore, determining the learning styles of civil engineering students is an important factor in their academic success. The research reported in this paper aims to explore the learning styles of civil engineering students in Turkey, and correlate their learning styles with success in construction management courses, gender, age, type of university, and year of engineering study. Data were collected using the Kolb Learning Style Inventory II, from civil engineering students in undergraduate programs at four different universities. The questionnaire was administered to students by direct contact, and 227 items of data were collec...

Virtual Placements to Develop Employability Skills for Civil and Environmental Engineering Students

This project work addresses the crucial need to encourage undergraduate civil and environmental engineering students to gain employment skills and training right from the start of their studies so that their overall employability increases; their confidence level in networking with industry and within the workplace increases; and so that they are successfully able to obtain employment after finishing their studies. This initiative is a stepping-stone employability exercise which focuses specifically on first year students to help them engage with industry right from the start of their course. It is proposed that they would gain some realistic work experience both individually and as part of group within a virtual work environment using an action learning approach. The virtual environment used was based on SecondLife, a popular virtual reality programme. A pilot scheme was set up and run at Brunel University during the summer of 2014 using eight self-selecting first year students. The scheme’s outputs were extensively monitored and evaluated to assess its impact on the development of employability skills. This approach may prove a cost effective way of letting students gain an insight into the workplace whilst improving these skills. It may also prove a way for employers to select from a large range of students the best to actually undertake their real work-based internships.

New Civil Engineer: Introducing Undergraduate Civil Engineers to Construction Technology

Undergraduate (UG) civil engineering students should graduate from university with knowledge that links their computational competence in structural engineering and mechanics to construction technology principles, processes and practice. However, there appears to be a paucity of evidence to suggest that UG civil engineering students receive sufficient instruction in construction technology throughout their degree studies. This paper presents evidence from a study employing the weekly New Civil Engineer (NCE) publication as a vehicle for introducing construction technology to first year students. The results reveal that students found this publication interesting and inspirational. Whilst this innovative approach to teaching construction technology would be best ‘blended’ throughout the UG course, its introduction, application and success arguably requires a multi-disciplinary and carefully ‘engineered’ approach. Given the diversity of academic staff, individual motivation and the professional demands of a contemporary mass higher education system, the prospective benefits from ‘blended’ learning in UG construction technology studies will in all probability remain unfulfilled.

National Geographic: understand civil engineering differently

Undergraduate civil engineering students have access to a rich and diverse bank of textual and graphic knowledge concerning their chosen profession. However, over a number of decades, commentators have raised concerns that students have insufficient understanding of the role of civil engineering in society. Indeed, the call for universities to educate ‘global engineers’ emphasises the need for students to be schooled in the humanities, in parallel with their core computational studies. Unfortunately, engineering students in particular are not accustomed to regular exploratory reading. This paper considers the use of the National Geographic magazine as a means to ignite students' curiosity in the world around them. The results from a pilot study and a content analysis of a number of editions from over a decade show that this periodical regularly carries themes directly concerning the impact of civil engineering in society, be it political, financial, environmental, social or ecological.

Stimulating Learning Ownership to Engineering Students via Learning Contract

The internet has changed students’ learning habits and opened up a vast source of knowledge from all over the world. With strong motivation students are now able to quickly learn on their own and gain a vast amount of knowledge. However, most academic staff still think that they are the main source of knowledge and the student would not be able to gain sufficient knowledge without classroom instruction. This paper describes the notion of a learning contract and how an experiment using learning contracts with a group of undergraduate civil engineering students resulted in improved learning and at the same time developed their soft skills. The experiment was administered on 30 final year students who were enrolled in the Sustainable Urban Planning course. Discussion was held at the beginning of the semester to determine firstly, how the course should be delivered and secondly, how to ensure that students achieve the learning objectives as agreed between lecturer and student. Based on discussions between lecturer and students a decision was made to reduce the hours of lectures and to increase case-based learning and problem-based learning. It was agreed in the final learning contract to have 12 hours of lectures, 3 individual assignments, a case study and one large group project in the form of problem-based learning to encourage immersive-collaborative learning. Students’ performances were measured using rubrics and their satisfaction was gauged via a centralised online survey. The results were compared with those of the two previous cohorts and were found to be encouraging. The achievement of the four course learning outcomes improved between 6 to 12% and student satisfaction increased 7%. These results indicate that transferring the ownership of learning to students through a learning contract encouraged the development of self motivation and eventually helped them to focus their learning activities towards the attainment of the learning outcomes of their course.