L5 Revit – Questions on Files

We’ve had several questions on the “output” for Lab-5.  Hopefully the following will make clear what we expect and how to achieve it.

Three Output files

We expect three files to be submitted.

• Revit File – the file that Revit creates that has your entire model.  The suffix is “.rvt”.  It’s a big file of probably 2-3MB size
• PDF of “sheet” – This is a PDF file that you create by “printing” your sheet (with plan, section, elevation etc all displayed on it) to a PDF file.
• Printing to a PDF requires that you have the full version of Adobe Acrobat installed on the computer your using (I’m pretty certain). 
• Acrobat is on all the machines in the CadLab
• You can download it from the Drexel Software site for your own machine (I’m pretty certain about this too, but cannot check the student version of the download site)
• Word Document - addressing the questions about the lab.

Jim Mitchell

Memo for Lab

A student emailed a question wanting to know what should be in the “Memo” for this lab. They said:

Do you want us to present the final calculations or also explain how we calculated it, how we did did the conversions and the data that was given to us? For now I just put, for example,
frontal area = xx sqin = xx sqft = xx sqm = xx sqkm = = xx sqcm = xx sqmi

What the instructions in the lab say is:

Summarize the laboratory and your understanding of its implications and limitations.  Do so in the textbox below, including as many specific numbers and details as possible to support your argument

The emphasis for the memo, therefore, is on your interpretation of the lab rather than the methods used.  Those methods should be evident on the sheets for the individual questions.  The kinds of things that you might discuss on the memo are:

• The US unit system
• The issues relating to unit conversion
• Significant digits
• The relevance of these calculations to professional life – positive or negative
• Why did we choose this lab for the first of the term?
• Are some or all of the calculations oversimplified?
• Does what we calculated here make sense in terms of your experience in CoOp or prior school experience
• The role of Excel as a tool – with specific comments on Excel techniques.
• etc……

Jim Mitchell

Clarifying the Discussion Requirements

The goal of the discussions is to have you look at the professional literature and also at your fellow student’s work. 

Primary Source

The requirement that everyone in a group read the “Primary Source” (at least using AccessScience as the starting point) is to ensure that there is a common ground.

Secondary Source

The secondary source may be any of those that you’re led to from the library’s reference page.  I would hope that it will in some way amplify or contradict or otherwise supplement what you have read in the primary source, but we won’t enforce that strictly, at least not initially till we see how the discussions develop in the first few weeks.  I’d certainly encourage you to link the two in what you write.

Jim Mitchell