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Garden City – A Virtual City for Undergraduates

Jess Everett, Marianne Cinaglia, Doug Cleary, Kauser Jahan, Joseph Orlins, Beena Sukumaran, Yusuf Mehta, Eric Hansen, Django Cissi, Brian Cleary, and Laura Coleman

ABSTRACT

The Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Rowan University (RU), with support from NSF and Rowan, will adopt “Sooner City”, a virtual city developed by the School of Civil Engineering and Environmental Science at the University of Oklahoma (OU). A more portable version of Sooner City will be created, to ease adoption by other institutions. To be named “Garden City” at Rowan, the portable civil city will be used in the CEE-RU undergraduate program. Garden City will provide continuity for the undergraduate degree program. Undergraduates will go to the Garden City website to obtain data and design criteria for homework and projects, and to access photos. They will also be able to store their projects and designs in the city, allowing them to record their accomplishments. Finally, the Garden City website will provide a central location for course webpages, tutorials, etc. Faculty will use Garden City to demonstrate the context (i.e., human communities) of many civil engineering projects. The purpose of this paper is to provide detail on the Garden City project, including how other institutions can adopt it.

INTRODUCTION

The following text is the Project Summary of “Sooner City - Design Across the Curriculum”, NSF grant # 9872505 (CEES 1998). It is included here to provide a brief summary of the Sooner City project, as this is the best way to introduce the reader to the project.

The School of Civil Engineering and Environmental Science (CEES) at the University of Oklahoma (OU) is embarking on a curriculum reform project entitled Sooner City. The project is in response to the call for more design in the curriculum, a call being made by the engineering accrediting agency, by practitioners who are dissatisfied with the design skills of graduates, and by faculty who want to promote higher-level thinking skills and improve retention. For the project, incoming freshman will be given a plot of undeveloped land that, by the time they graduate, will be turned into a blueprint for certain segments of the city (time constraints prevent the design of an entire city). Design tasks include all facets of the traditional civil engineering program, such as site planning and layout, sewer and water infrastructure, water supply, wastewater treatment, buildings, transportation systems, channel design, floodplain analysis, and geotechnical work. A common, four-year design project unifies the curriculum and allows material learned in early courses to carry forward, unlike

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Everett, J. (2002, June), Garden City Undergraduate Virtual City Paper presented at 2002 Annual Conference, Montreal, Canada. 10.18260/1-2--11130