EDUCATION NOTES
Chief Architect class at PAHS
JIM POTTS

An architecture class was added at the first of this year at Port Aransas High School. The course name is TICAD (Technical Introduction to Computer Aided Design). The software was funded by a grant from the South Texas Tech Prep Consortium.

The class is made up of several highly motivated students who have been designing houses since the first of the year. The program, which is based on three-dimensional renderings and objects, allows a student to design and see the house in real time. Changes are made and looked at in a 3-D model from any view. You can actually walk through the house and make changes on your computer screen and see them instantaneously. This gives the student designers the ability to create and design at the same time. It is amazing to have a student show you a walk-through of their house and look outside of a window and see their landscaping for a particular time of the year. The details are really impressive.

There is a Web page coming online with PDF files of their work, and they will store all of their files for viewing. There is a viewer we are hoping to acquire that will allow interested Web site visitors the ability to open the files and look at all items of the design from the Chief Architect files.

Included with this column are a few of the students' designs. This was a new assignment started Jan. 22 -- one week ago. They have complete floor plans, interiors, and landscape design. They will finish up this week with electrical plan, swimming pool and hot tub and all the necessary views of the house exterior and schedules. These will be placed in the title block along with schedules.

Jim Potts, who has considerable experience teaching CAD and design classes, teaches the TICAD course at PAHS.

Samples of student work in Chief Architect