CDIO APPROACH FOR DEVELOPMENT OF TEMPERATURE RISE MONITORING SYSTEM

A Research and Development (R&D) project sponsored by both the Building Construction Authority (BCA), Singapore and Admaterials Technologies Pte Ltd for the development of an Adiabatic Temperature Rise (ATR) testing system to replace on-site mock-up tests for preventing cracks of concrete, improving concrete durability and sustainability, and enhancing construction productivity was successfully completed last year. Conceiving, Designing, Implementing, and Operating (CDIO) approach was used for the development of the system by a team consisting of two academic staffs, two groups of Final Year Project (FYP) students and an industry collaborator. This system has won the Singapore Polytechnic R&D Award 2018 and Singapore Ministry of Education Innergy Award 2018. This paper describes in detail how the team used CDIO standards especially standards 5, 6, 7 and 8 as a guideline to conceive, design, implement, and operate the system. It also illustrates in detail how the final year project (FYP) students used Singapore Polytechnic’s Advanced Materials Technology Research Centre as a learning workspace for achieving pre-defined learning outcomes. In future a capstone project, which requests students to conceive and design a “recipe” and test concrete samples cast using the “recipe” by the ATR system for checking its effectiveness, will be developed for module “Structural Inspection & Repair” for students to do active and real time experiential learning of mass site concreting in Laboratory environment. Feedback was collected from the two groups of students after they had completed their FYPs. The very positive feedback shows that students have developed strong competency in obtaining disciplinary and cross-disciplinary knowledge and skills in reasoning through active and project-based learning, collaborative and coordinative team work spirit, and strong skills in report writing and presentation etc., which are required by CDIO syllabus.