Reflections on Intelligent Buildings

Overall, I really enjoyed this course, if you are an Architectural Engineer and the course title "Intelligent Buildings" doesn't excite you, than you might be in the wrong major (I know this course had to serve other majors as well). I think this course did a good job of living up to its exciting title.

I think Maria and Jeanine pointed out the biggest issue students (including myself) had with the class, which was that the assignments sometimes piled up very high on each other. This was sometimes a pain to deal with (I can imagine that is was just as a pain to grade in a timely manner). However, this class IS a masters level class for many students, and should be more rigorous than an average undergraduate class. I did not find the work in class to be super challenging, however the class still turned out to be a handful with the amount of work that needed to be successfully juggled, which provided the master's level rigor which requires students to have discipline to successfully complete. Everyone likes an "Easy A" class, however in a 10 week term, it is sometimes very hard to successfully learn a large amount of material without it being speedily thrown at you (just like in the real world).

I also agree with many of the other students that suggest that this course is one that you really get out what you put in. For my project, my partner Tom Ben-David and I decided to build a sensor network from scratch and then wrote a paper on the use of the sensors in a multi-sensor room. This was admittedly biting off a little more than we could chew, and we got the paper written very close to the deadline due to the time it took to actually build the sensor network (even missing some features we wanted). However, the process was very rewarding, and I feel like I got a lot more out of the project than writing a strictly research based paper.  I felt the same way about many of the other assignments in the class such as creating a report for my database that included graphs really pushed the envelope on the scope of the project and added tangible skills to my resume and skill base.