Abstract:

In July 2015 the Spanish Ministry of Public Works launched the es.BIM Commission in order to implement Building Information Modeling (BIM) in Spain. The commission was created not only to promote the implementation of BIM in the Spanish construction sector, but also to encourage its use throughout the life cycle of civil and building constructions and to establish the way construction technicians will be trained.

In addition, the es.BIM Commission established a milestone for the year 2020 were all public facilities and infrastructure projects --for both new construction and rehabilitation--, must be presented with BIM. Despite the BIM initiative has been launched, Spain is taking a considerable delay in the adoption of this methodology.

For this reason, the School of Building Construction (ETSEM) of the Technical University of Madrid (UPM) has decided to go ahead and anticipate the possible solution of commitment towards BIM training in the University. For this reason, a project to be implemented over the next four academic years of the Building Construction Degree was designed.

The project was divided into several stages: a first stage comprising the dissemination of the project, a second stage focused on lecturers’ training and finally a third stage focused on students’ training. The students’ training will be achieved, course by course, through several BIM Workshops associated with specific subjects.

This paper presents the results achieved during the first year of the project’s implementation. In particular, results from the teachers’ training and the first BIM Workshop implementation in the subject “Introduction to Construction”, are presented and discussed.

The results show that students have a strong interest in BIM issues and are eager to advance their knowledge in BIM methodology. It is therefore important to involve lecturers from other subjects in order to provide more BIM workshops of specific contents. This will promote the formation of multidisciplinary workshops to enhance students’ collaborative work using BIM methodology. Finally, it is necessary to conduct a review and update the existing School Teaching Plans in order to include BIM competencies in the skills of undergraduate Building Construction Degrees.

Keywords:

BIM, methodology, implementation, construction, University.