Hands-on exercise for enhancing students' construction management skills

This paper presents a hands-on exercise on construction project management to augment traditional teaching methods and help students improve their construction experience and project management skills. The exercise involved 100 students participating in managing and constructing a 3.8-m (12.5-ft) model of Canada's CN Tower within a 30-min deadline. Before construction, the groups prepared method statements, cost estimates, and schedules for constructing the model. During construction, the groups had to manage limited resources, procurement challenges, and forced interruptions to keep the project on track. To experience new project-tracking methods, students were introduced to a voice-based prototype for collecting progress information and automatically updating the schedule. The results indicate that students gained better understanding of the real construction environment and how to apply their acquired construction management skills to handle the involved complexities and interdependencies. The paper can be of interest mainly to researchers and educators. It presents the design, planning, and implementation of this educational exercise and discusses its practicality and ability to enhance the project management skills of students.