It often is said that experience is the best teacher, but what happens if the teacher is absent? How will the rising generation of construction professionals apply the insight of veteran practitioners in an industry where recent economic turmoil has driven droves of them to retire?
This is a problem researchers in my lab at the University of Texas at Austin have been studying, and we believe we have a partial solution in a problem-based learning tool that we have developed for mechanical, electrical and plumbing design coordination. We have a prototype and are ready to test and improve it through real-world application.