August 31, 2020
Professor Annie Pearce taught an in-person Sustainable Facilities & Infrastructure Lab to help students virtual teamwork. “We’ve found that spending the first week getting to know the other folks on your team and developing a team charter that governs how you will work together significantly reduces the number of issues later on during the semester, particularly during a largely online class where you may only see each other in person every few weeks for lab but then need to coordinate virtually to get your analysis and reporting done. We welcomed students to the class and then engaged them in their new teams in a few lab safety exercises, including a ropes exercise to lay out their workspace with appropriate social distancing and a safe don/doff of gloves exercise where students tested their hands under UV light to make sure they had maintained sanitary procedures during the lab.”
September 28, 2020
Professor Annie Pearce taught an in-person Sustainable Facilities & Infrastructure Lab where students adapted a standard concrete mix design as part of a job site scenario where there’s a last minute problem for a hand-mixed batch. Each team had to adjust its mix design to account for an hypothetical variation in the raw materials available. Over the years, we’ve explored how the properties of concrete are affected by different types of aggregate, contamination of the mix water with Gatorade and coffee, and substitution of hemp particles for portions of the coarse or fine aggregate. After designing an adjusted mix, each team mixed up a batch of concrete, performed a slump test, and created a concrete test cylinder. Later in the semester, they will do compression testing and physical inspection of each mix design to see how the variations influence the compressive strength.
