Educating Land Development Engineers about Construction Activities through a Field Journal Technique

摘要

Land development is a very eclectic area in civil and environmental engineering. The practitioners must be knowledgeable in many fields of engineering and other disciplines ranging from accessibility to zoning and many topics in between, including construction engineering. It is also recognized that civil engineering students should have closer contact with real-world construction, and in many cases this has been accomplished with bringing construction site aspects into the classroom, but may also be accomplished by bringing the classroom to the construction site. In addition, the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET) system, which is used for accreditation of most of the collegiate engineering programs in the United States lists one of the outcomes that must be demonstrated is that the graduates of these programs have the ability to communicate effectively. One of the areas important for engineers in land development is being able to communicate field information effectively. Added to these important issues, is the belief that spatial visualization contributes to success in engineering. Thus, the idea of a field journal exercise covering progress at a nearby construction site was considered as an assignment for use by engineering students studying land development, so that these students could observe construction activities and learn to translate their visual observations at a construction site into a written and/or sketched format.