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In civil and construction engineering education research, a focus has been on using 3D models to support students’ design comprehension. Despite this trend, the predominant mode of design communication in the industry relies on 2D plans and specifications, which typically supersede other modes of communication. Rather than focusing on the presentation of less common 3D content as an input to support students’ understanding of a design, this paper explores more common 2D inputs, but compares different visualization formats of student output in two educational interventions. In the first intervention, students document a construction sequence for wood-framed elements in a 2D worksheet format. In the second, students work with the same wood-framed design, but document their sequence through an augmented reality (AR) format where their physical interactions move full-scale virtual elements as if they were physically constructing the wood frame. Student approaches and performance were analyzed using qualitative attribute coding of video, audio, and written documentation of the student experience. Overall, results showed that the 2D worksheet format was simple to implement and was not mentally demanding to complete, but often corresponded with a lack of critical checks and a lack of mistake recognition from the students. The AR approach challenged students more in terms of cognitive load and completion rates but showed the potential for facilitating mistake recognition and self-remediation through visualization. These results suggest that when students are tasked with conceptualizing construction sequences from 2D documentation, the cognitive challenges associated with documenting a sequence in AR may support their recognition of their own mistakes in ways that may not be effectively supported through 2D documentation as an output for documenting and planning a construction sequence. The results presented in this paper provide insights on student tendencies, behaviors, and perceptions related to defining construction sequences from 2D documentation in order for educators to make informed decisions regarding the use of similar learning activities to prepare their students for understanding the 2D design documents used in industry. 

This work-in-progress paper presents highlights from a multi-year study aiming to develop and assess the impact of a mixed reality experience that sufficiently replicates the learning civil engineering students experience during a physical design and construction task. Human Centered Design principles and tenets of the Carnegie Foundation's Three Apprenticeships Model (i.e., learning related to "Head", "Hand", and "Heart") inform the project design, development, and assessments. The development of heart-focused assessments is one focus during the second year in this three-year project. This paper includes a brief overview of the project progress, in general, along with preliminary findings regarding the instrument development. It summarizes the results of a pilot study, including an item analysis of the survey responses. These findings offer preliminary evidence for the content validity and substantive validity of the instrument. Next steps and implications for the engineering education community are also discussed. 

Effective construction engineering and management education requires hands-on experiences that have not traditionally been offered in classroom settings. Physical building competitions like Solar Decathlon are valuable for providing experiential learning opportunities that may support tacit and explicit knowledge development among students, but they are often not available to all students due to funding and resource limitations. Less resource intensive teaching strategies, such as project based learning, can mimic the benefit of physical experiences by providing context to learning content. This paper reviews project based learning literature to identify trends in reported learning gains from the adoption of this strategy. Additionally, emerging technologies offer the ability to create low cost, immersive multimedia environments that may be able to support the types of learning targeted by physical design and construction experiences. Literature on multimedia learning theory is explored to identify opportunities for multimedia applications to facilitate learnings derived by physical educational contexts, but with the use of increasingly affordable multimedia strategies. This paper resulted in identifying six learning gains that have a theoretical potential to be facilitated using augmented reality and virtual reality technologies. The theoretical potential was deduced based on prior research on teaching strategies that provide real-world context to learning content. The authors of this paper propose using the identified learning gains as targets to specifically design implementation studies to verify this potential. The learning gains identified in the results section can be targeted and measured in future research when empirically validating the use of immersive technologies for construction education. The contribution of this work is in synthesizing the learning gains that future researchers should target based on evidence from prior research in related learning contexts. 

This research work-in-progress paper investigated the application of emerging mixed reality (MR) technology in construction and engineering education. The construction industry is facing a severe shortage of skilled workforce. As the baby boomers are retiring, the younger generation, especially college students, are often criticized for their lack of professional experience and career-specific competency. To close the skills gap and accelerate the transition of college students to competent workforce, this paper proposed a new genre of learning and professional training using MR. The main promise of the MR technology resides in its ability to augment virtual contents on top of the physical reality to facilitate tacit knowledge learning, and simulate learning activities that traditionally can only be obtained from actual professional experience. An undergraduate wood framing lab was designed as a case study to explore how students might perform in this new learning and training environment. Specifically, the case study investigated if MR would facilitate student design comprehension and transfer such understanding into the knowledge and skills needed to build the wood structure. A randomly selected student control group was given traditional paper-based construction drawings to perform the same tasks with other student groups with various visualization technology assistance. Project performance and behavior of student groups were compared to determine if there was a significant difference between the control group and the experiment groups. A pair of pre- and post-survey on MR-intervened learning experience was also conducted to explore student perceptions towards this new genre of learning and training. The research design proposed in this work-in-progress study and its preliminary results could be a good reference and foundation to future research in this arena.