Auburn University Student team wins International Design Build competition

A student team from the McWhorter School of Building Science (BSCI), a part of the College of Architecture, Design and Construction (CADC), won the International Design Build contest held in Dallas, Texas, on March 2. This was the first year Auburn was competing in the Region V International Student Competitions. Auburn’s Sam Moffett (ARCH), David Sullivan (BSCI) and Todd Amos (BSCI) teamed with three students from Birmingham City University (BCU), UK. The Auburn team was advised by Ben Farrow, Aderholdt Professor at CADC, and the BCU team was led by Angela Kilby, a senior lecturer at the university.

The competition requires teams to work on a problem presented by a sponsor and make a presentation before a panel of judges. Four international teams partnered with four university teams from the United States for the competition. The teams received a request for proposal on Saturday, February 28. The problem selected by their sponsor, The Beck Group, was to design and build a high school in the Dallas area. The team concentrated for 16 hours to solve the problem at Auburn, traveled to Dallas for meetings with industry, and then the students gave a 35-minute presentation on Monday, March 2. Each team was required to demonstrate skills in written proposal and compliance with proposal requests, scheduling and problem solving, plan of construction as well as quality assurance and logic analysis and methodology, cost estimate and pricing, and risk management.

The annual competition is organized by the Associated Schools of Construction (ASC), a professional association for the development and advancement of construction education.