Sustainable Design with BIM Facilitation in Project-based Learning

Emerging trends of green building and building information modelling (BIM) are driving profound transformation within the architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) industry nowadays. This paradigm shift has also set up new expectations on college students for their competencies in sustainability and BIM. While most higher education institutions have already incorporated such topics in their curricula, green building and BIM are typically taught separately. In this study, instructors from two classes adopted an integrated approach and designed a joint course project focusing on both sustainable design and BIM implementation. With BIM facilitation, students collaborated in teams working on artefacts and other tasks to accomplish predefined sustainable goals for a real building project. The project based learning provides an ideal framework to evaluate critical factors that influence the execution of BIM in green building project delivery. Formative and summative assessments of student learning outcomes in model communication, teamwork, critical thinking, problem-solving, and sustainability were conducted. The results of this study provide insight into innovative pedagogic design for sustainability and BIM education in the AEC curricula. The study also confirmed the effectiveness of project based learning in cultivating student competencies in critical thinking and problem-solving within a multidisciplinary project environment.