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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. 

Although some have called for engineering curricula that fully integrates learning in the head (cognitive), hand (skill), and heart (affective) domains, others acknowledge the difficulty of overhauling existing curriculum to adequately prioritize the ''heart''. The opinions of experts are often consulted to inform curricular changes, but this is rarely compared to the opinions of novices. There is a need for a better understanding of both experts' and novices' perspectives on the role of the ''heart'' in engineering education and in engineering work. With an emphasis on civil engineering, this study uses a convergent parallel mixed methods research design and Shulman's Three Apprenticeships framework to investigate expert and novice perspectives on the priority of affective constructs in undergraduate education and their approach to designing facilities for users with needs different from their own. Data was collected from civil engineering experts and novices at an annual regional civil engineering-focused conference. Results suggest experts and novices may have different perspectives on which values should be emphasized earlier versus later in civil engineering education. Implications of the results from this study suggest that while many values should be emphasized in engineering education, it might be important for educators to emphasize certain values (e.g., compassion) earlier rather than later to assist in the development of a well-rounded engineer. 

The building industry has a major impact on the US economy and accounts for: $1 trillion in annual spending; 40% of the nation’s primary energy use; and 9 million jobs. Despite its massive impact, the industry has been criticized for poor productivity compared with other industries and billions of dollars in annual waste because of poor interoperability. Furthermore, the industry has been approaching a “labor cliff”: there are not enough new individuals entering the industry to offset the vacancies left by an aging, retiring workforce. To remain effective, this critical industry will need to do better with less. In order to prepare civil engineering students for careers in this industry, educators have aimed to replicate the processes associated with real-world projects through design/build educational activities like the Department of Energy’s (DOE) Solar Decathlon, Sacramento Municipal Utility District’s (SMUD) Tiny House Competition, and DOE’s Challenge Home Competition. These learning experiences help situate civil engineering concepts in an authentic learning environment. Unfortunately, not all universities have the financial resources necessary to fund this type of hands-on project. Technology has the potential to mitigate some of these inequities. Thus, the multi-faceted objective of this project is to: develop mixed reality (MR) technology aimed at sufficiently replicating physical design and construction learning environments to enable access to students at institutions without sufficient resources; and assess the impact of a MR-facilitated cyberlearning environment on promoting cognitive-, affective-, and skill-based learning that occurs during traditional (in-persona) design and construction activities. This research will explore a fundamental question: Can MR technology enable educators to simulate physical design and construction activities at low costs to enable students at all institutions to gain exposure to these types of hands-on learning environments? In order to address this question, we employ an iterative development approach according to Human Centered Design principles to support learning according to the Carnegie Foundation’s Three Apprenticeships Model (i.e., learning related to “Head”, “Hand”, and “Heart”). In order to achieve these aims, the research team uses MR technology (i.e., a Microsoft HoloLens®) to understand the extent to which this mode of education allows students to demonstrate knowledge similar to that which is gained through physical design and construction learning environments. This paper will presents highlights from the first year of this project.