GRAPHISOFT North America is celebrating an exciting day at Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University (FAMU). We watched students present final projects, some of which were created in ARCHICAD, after completion of a new ARCHICAD online course – “ARCHICAD & BIM Workflow Fundamentals & Intermediate Training”.
The course got its start thanks in part to the efforts of Shanelle Reese, an architecture student at FAMU and the President of Alpha Rho Chi (the National Professional Fraternity for Architecture and the Allied Arts). Reese attended an AIA Lunch and Learn, on the recommendation of Rhonda Hammond, a Professor at FAMU and Architect at Tallahassee, FL-based ARCHICAD firm, Hammond Design Group. During the event, Reese learned about and fell in love with ARCHICAD and gathered a group of her fellow architecture students to petition Professor Hammond to start an online ARCHICAD course. Veleda Miller, GRAPHISOFT BIM Consultant worked with Hammond and Resse to make the course available.
“My first exposure to BIM was learning Revit under the instruction of Professor Hammond at FAMU two years ago,” explained Resse. “This past September Hammond introduced me to ARCHICAD and it changed my whole world view on BIM! My projects began representing me as a student of architecture and making corrections were now easy to fix. Soon after, I meet Veleda Miller and we worked together on introducing the school of architecture to ARCHICAD – providing certification upon course completion. It is gratifying to see what we envisioned come to pass.”
Over the course of the past few weeks, students working toward an architecture degree at FAMU dug into ARCHICAD & BIM Workflow Fundamentals & Intermediate Training in ARCHICAD. The training gives students an understanding of how to use ARCHICAD on architectural projects. Each student who completed the training received 13 CEU LU Credits.
Response to the software has been overwhelmingly positive, according to Hammond. “After learning the fundamentals of ARCHICAD the students took it upon themselves to earnestly beseech the Dean himself for the software to be integrated,” she explained. “It was gratifying to see their reaction when they experienced their projects with BIMx and the Google Cardboard viewer for the first time. At that moment, I saw their imaginations expanding as they talked about how they could use this technology presenting the projects in an upcoming jury. ARCHICAD opens up possibilities they didn’t know existed. This experience made me realize we are inspiring the next generation of architects and designers.”
Building on the success of the online course; ARCHICAD has now been installed in the FAMU computer lab and Professor Hammond has integrated the software into her lesson plans. She has gotten permission to now teach a course on ARCHICAD fundamentals and intermediate training (offered by the school) using the pre-recorded lessons as a guide. Going forward, Professor Hammond plans to create a 10-12 part series on ARCHICAD that will be taught every semester.
We congratulate all the students who participated and look forward to seeing their future success.
From: https://blog.graphisoftus.com/graphisoft/building-the-future-at-famu-with-archicad
