Ensino de Revit® em disciplinas do curso noturno de engenharia civil em uma instituição de ensino privada

BIM instruction at the institution began in 2019, in a 9th-semester course called Applied Computer Graphics for Civil Engineering (44 hours), teaching the basic level of Autodesk's Revit® software. The software was chosen for two reasons: i) the institution already had an agreement with Autodesk; ii) Autodesk provides free downloads of the software to students. Using Revit®, students developed the design for a two-story house. The civil engineering course admits students twice a year (in January and July), so the courses are offered every semester. Thus, in the first semester of 2019, 53 students enrolled in the course, and only 4 failed (7.5%). In the second semester of 2019, there were 30 students enrolled, and only 2 failed (6.7%). The institution has a large number of transfer students who take courses from various semesters. Some of these students, nearing graduation (10th semester), requested that the course also be offered to them. Therefore, in the first semester of 2020, the elective course "Directed Study in Computer Graphics" (22 hours) was offered to guide the development of projects in Revit®. Because it had half the workload of the original course, it was structured so that the professor would only present the initial concepts of BIM, indicate videos, books, and manuals for self-learning Revit®, and guide the completion of the assignments. The course began to be taught in person, but had to be transferred to a remote format due to the COVID-19 pandemic. In this context, the professor changed the evaluation method, allowing students who did not have access to the software to complete a theoretical assignment. Even so, most students were unsuccessful, with 10 out of the 18 enrolled failing (55.6%). The Applied Computer Graphics for Civil Engineering course was also offered in the first semester of 2020 to 9th-semester students, starting in person and finishing remotely. This negatively impacted the software's practical application, as some students did not have computers. These students were not penalized in terms of passing the course (of the 38 enrolled students, only 2 failed, or 5.3%), as the instructor allowed students without the software to create a theoretical manual on its use. In 2019, Revit® instruction took place in the Computer Lab, and each student had access to a computer with the software installed. Due to the pandemic, the course was not offered in the second semester of 2020. However, during that period, following student requests and seeking to meet market demands and national BIM implementation guidelines, a curriculum review was conducted.The course titled "Graphical Representation for Projects," which deals with BIM, began to be offered to second-semester students, with a workload of 80 hours. It starts with teaching AutoCAD® software and, from the middle of the semester, begins to cover Revit®. The basics of using the software are taught with the intention of: i) allowing students, upon reaching the 9th semester, to learn Revit® at an intermediate level, ii) enabling them to develop projects for other courses using BIM software. Of the 53 students enrolled, 20 failed (37.7%), even though the instructor allowed students without access to the software to complete theoretical assignments.

Based on the above, three factors can be inferred that influenced student performance in the evaluated subjects: the delivery modality (in-person or remote), the level of knowledge about building design, and the nature of the course offering (mandatory or elective). In the two classes of the Applied Computer Graphics for Civil Engineering course offered to 9th-semester students, the failure rate was 7.5% and 6.7%, respectively. The content and manner of conducting this course by the instructor, the in-person modality, combined with the fact that the students already had sufficient knowledge about building design, stood out as positive factors regarding the detected performance. For this course offered to 9th-semester students remotely in the first semester of 2020, a similar failure rate was observed compared to the in-person offering of this course. However, the influence of remote teaching could not be identified, as alternative assignments that did not require the application of the software in question were accepted as student assessments. In the Directed Study in Computer Graphics course, it was observed that the optional nature of its offering, as well as remote learning, negatively influenced student performance, culminating in a high failure rate. Finally, regarding the Graphic Representation for Projects course offered remotely to second-semester students, despite the higher workload compared to the other courses analyzed, the influence of the delivery modality and the fact that these students lacked prior knowledge of building design is clearly evident, resulting in a failure rate of 37.7%. Therefore, this study can help define the ideal semester for the inclusion of BIM teaching in the civil engineering course curriculum.