scholarly journals Solar Decathlon. Interdisciplinary and collaborative research competing on a world stage

2017 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 31
Author(s):  
Guy Marriage

<p>The Solar Decathlon is an international student competition requiring university-led interdisciplinary student teams to research, design, build and operate a solar-powered house. Projects like this are highly competitive but have significant learning benefits for those involved. The Decathlon requires a wide range of student skills and so is by nature highly interdisciplinary. To win requires a significant amount of collaboration between team members who must rapidly accumulate specialised knowledge of diverse fields including solar design. This paper looks at the Solar Decathlon 2011 project submitted by Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, examines the pedagogical methodologies used, and debates the usefulness of this type of interdisciplinary and collaborative project for students of a school of architecture. It notes the difficulties placed on integration of a single-project focus on the wider scope of a typical architectural education and proposes that the broader degree curriculum may benefit from evolving to better accommodate the flexibility needed for targeted design-led research competitions such as the Solar Decathlon.</p>

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Eli Nuttall

<p>This thesis will examine the logistical strategies and construction techniques used in the making of the First Light house. First Light was the 2011 team entered by Victoria University of Wellington to compete in the US Department of Energy (DOE) Solar Decathlon. The team is largely comprised of students and staff in Architecture and the Building Sciences, but also spans to include students from; Design, Landscape Architecture, Marketing and Communications, Tourism Management, and Commerce. The competition took place in September of 2011 and marked the culmination of a two year period of development within the University.  The U.S. Department of Energy Solar Decathlon challenges collegiate teams to design, build, and operate solar-powered houses that are cost-effective, energy efficient, and attractive. (U.S. Department of Energy, 2012)  The Solar Decathlon has established a very focused and complex brief that, due to its competitive nature, demands an extremely high level of logistical and technical innovation. It captures many of the core issues that architects and engineers are facing today. These issues are centred on energy efficiency, energy production, affordability, and the making of a more liveable and sustainable built environment.</p>


2021 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
pp. 3329-3338
Author(s):  
Nikola Horvat ◽  
Niccolò Becattini ◽  
Stanko Škec

AbstractThis paper analyses the use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in a distributed product design project-based learning (PBL). The paper presents the ICT use of five international student teams during three product design phases: identification of opportunities, conceptual design, embodiment design. General results show that student teams used around 30 different ICTs for both taskwork and teamwork. Students reported that they used previously known ICTs or ICTs properly introduced to them during the initial course workshop. Results also show that team members often work individually on their tasks and use various procedures to share their results. Also, teams conduct some activities synchronously, suggesting the need for teams to have a collaborative workspace. Cloud-based collaborative ICTs (e.g. whiteboard, computer-aided design, document editor, task management) showed huge potential for individual and team tasks. Hence, educators and teams should carefully consider which ICTs to implement and learn, as it might greatly impact the execution of the product design PBL course.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Eli Nuttall

<p>This thesis will examine the logistical strategies and construction techniques used in the making of the First Light house. First Light was the 2011 team entered by Victoria University of Wellington to compete in the US Department of Energy (DOE) Solar Decathlon. The team is largely comprised of students and staff in Architecture and the Building Sciences, but also spans to include students from; Design, Landscape Architecture, Marketing and Communications, Tourism Management, and Commerce. The competition took place in September of 2011 and marked the culmination of a two year period of development within the University.  The U.S. Department of Energy Solar Decathlon challenges collegiate teams to design, build, and operate solar-powered houses that are cost-effective, energy efficient, and attractive. (U.S. Department of Energy, 2012)  The Solar Decathlon has established a very focused and complex brief that, due to its competitive nature, demands an extremely high level of logistical and technical innovation. It captures many of the core issues that architects and engineers are facing today. These issues are centred on energy efficiency, energy production, affordability, and the making of a more liveable and sustainable built environment.</p>


2009 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Chalimah .

eamwork is becoming increasingly important to wide range of operations. It applies to all levels of the company. It is just as important for top executives as it is to middle management, supervisors and shop floor workers. Poor teamwork at any level or between levels can seriously damage organizational effectiveness. The focus of this paper was therefore to examine whether leadership practices consist of team leader behavior, conflict resolution style and openness in communication significantly influenced the team member’s satisfaction in hotel industry. Result indicates that team leader behavior and the conflict resolution style significantly influenced team member satisfaction. It was surprising that openness in communication did not affect significantly to the team members’ satisfaction.


2021 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
pp. 1529-1536
Author(s):  
Mohammad Reza Dastmalchi ◽  
Bimal Balakrishnan ◽  
Danielle Oprean

AbstractTeam collaboration is a critical necessity of the modern-day engineering design profession. This is no surprise given that teams typically possess more task-relevant skills and knowledge than individuals (Levine & Choi, 2004). Advancements in digital media provide new opportunities for collaboration across the design lifecycle. However, early stages of the design process still pose challenges to digitally mediated design collaboration due to greater representational abstraction and the presence of multiple modalities for design ideation. Usually, design teams spend a substantial amount of time generating a broad set of ideas that can lead them to a wide range of design solutions during the ideation phase. However, sooner or later, teams should narrow down their vision for a final solution. What factors influence team members to eliminate or select an idea? Our study is an attempt to demonstrate some examples of this challenge. By drawing on research in team cognition, particularly the concept of transactive memory system (TMS) we studied a design teams' communication and media use during the ideation phase. The goal was to see if media type and communication modes can predict a team's decisions on selecting and eliminating ideas.


Author(s):  
Ronald H Stevens ◽  
Trysha L Galloway

Uncertainty is a fundamental property of neural computation that becomes amplified when sensory information does not match a person’s expectations of the world. Uncertainty and hesitation are often early indicators of potential disruption, and the ability to rapidly measure uncertainty would have implications for future educational and training efforts by targeting reflective discussions about past actions, supporting in-progress corrections, and generating forecasts about future disruptions. An approach is described combining neurodynamics and machine learning to provide quantitative measures of uncertainty. Models of neurodynamic information derived from electroencephalogram (EEG) brainwaves have provided detailed neurodynamic histories of US Navy submarine navigation team members. Persistent periods (25–30 s) of neurodynamic information were seen as discrete peaks when establishing the submarine’s position and were identified as periods of uncertainty by an artificial intelligence (AI) system previously trained to recognize the frequency, magnitude, and duration of different patterns of uncertainty in healthcare and student teams. Transition matrices of neural network states closely predicted the future uncertainty of the navigation team during the three minutes prior to a grounding event. These studies suggest that the dynamics of uncertainty may have common characteristics across teams and tasks and that forecasts of their short-term evolution can be estimated.


1989 ◽  
Vol 21 (8-9) ◽  
pp. 889-897 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. M. Lopez-Real ◽  
E. Witter ◽  
F. N. Midmer ◽  
B. A. O. Hewett

Collaborative research between Southern Water and Wye College, University of London, has led to the development of a static aerated pile composting process for the treatment of dewatered activated sludge cake/straw mixtures. The process reduces bulk volume of the sludge producing an environmentally acceptable, stabilised, odour and pathogen-free product. Characteristics of the compost make it a suitable general purpose medium for container grown plants, providing the salt concentration is reduced by washing the compost prior to planting. Compared with peat the compost has a higher bulk density, a lower waterholding capacity, a lower cation exchange capacity, a high content of soluble salts, and a higher content of plant nutrients. A compost mixture was successfully developed in the growing trials containing equal quantities of compost, Sphagnum peat, and horticultural vermiculite. The compost has been used successfully to grow a wide range of plants. Plants grown in mixtures based on the compost were in general similar to those grown in peat-based growing media. The compost is a valuable soil conditioner and slow release fertilizer.


2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 18
Author(s):  
Hanan Subhi Al-Shamaly

The concept of caring is vague and complex, especially in critical environments such as the intensive care unit (ICU), where technological dehumanisation is a challenge for nurses. ICU nursing care includes not only patients but also extends to patients’ families, nurses, other health team members and the unit’s environment. Caring in critical care settings is affected by enabling and impeding factors. To explore these enablers and challenges factors, a focused ethnographic study was conducted in an Australian ICU. The data was collected from 35 registered nurses through various resources: participants' observations, documents reviews, interviews, and additional participants’ notes. Data were analysed inductively and thematically. The study outlines comprehensively and widely a wide range of enablers and challenges affecting caring in the ICU - which originate from different sources such as patients, families, nurses, and the ICU environment. This paper is the second in a two-part series which explores the ICU nurses’ experiences and perspectives of the enablers and challenges of caring in the ICU. Part 1 was concerned with the enablers and challenges to caring that are related to ICU patients, families, and environment. While Part 2 introduces readers to the enablers and challenges factors that are concerned with the nurses in ICU. These factors include nurses’ educational backgrounds and professional experience, employment working factors, leadership styles, relationships, and personal factors. Nurses and other stakeholders such as clinicians, educators, researchers, managers, and policymakers need to recognize these factors and their implications for providing quality care, in order to enhance and maintain the optimal level of caring in the ICU.


2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Z. Selden ◽  
Thomas J. Williams ◽  
Nancy Velchoff ◽  
Michael B. Collins

On August 19, 2016, selected Clovis artifacts from the Gault site (41BL323) were scanned in advance of a large collaborative research project. These data were collected using a NextEngineHD running ScanStudioHD Pro, and were post-processed in Geomagic Design X 2016.0.1. All data associated with this project have been made publicly available (open access) and are accessible in Zenodo under a Creative Commons Attribution license, where they can be downloaded for use in additional projects and learning activities. These data have the capacity to augment a variety of research designs spanning the digital humanities, applications of geometric morphometrics, and many others. Additionally, these scans will augment a wide range of comparative research topics throughout the Americas and beyond. Reuse potential for these data is significant.


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