Research on the Reform of the Preliminary Course of Architectural Design Based on Innovation & Practice Ability Training

The traditional undergraduate education mode of architecture has been unable to adapt to the rapid development of society. Taking the junior professional course of architecture—the preliminary course of architectural design as an example, this paper analyzes the problems existing in the current professional courses of lower grades, puts forward the opinion that the cultivation of innovation & practice ability should be included in the professional training objectives, and the corresponding reforms of the training program and teaching methods should be made, in order to provide the reference for the construction in the basic teaching of architecture.


Introduction
In order to cope with the increasingly complex problems of urban and architectural development, profound changes have taken place in the connotation and extension of Architecture: on the one hand, architectural education will pay more attention to the understanding and application of other related disciplines, especially the humanities, so as to form a generalized teaching system which is more closely integrated with the social reality, profession and general education; on the other hand, architectural education as a kind of professional education without a "uniformly standard answer" will be more embodied in the process of exploratory teaching, which is to find, analyze and solve problems, and the students' ability to deal with complex problems and their comprehensive quality will be improved through this process.Therefore, reforming teaching system and strengthening practice is not only an urgent need for the development of architectural education, but also an inevitable trend of cultivating innovative talents.
The preliminary course of architectural design is the most important professional course for architectural undergraduates in the lower grades.It's the preparative and initial stage of a series of courses in building design.The teaching content mainly includes basic professional theory, cognition, skills and architectural design method, etc.In the past decades, we have always paid more attention to the foundation of professional knowledge and skills for the further study, but ignored the training of the practice and innovation ability in engineering.As a result, practice curricula in the higher grades cannot be connected well with preliminary curricula, students are not active in the design process and their ability to solve social problems is poor.

The Revision of Training Objectives
The previous teaching objective of preliminary course of architectural design is to cultivate students with the structure of professional basic knowledge, basic skills and design thinking.It focuses on the teaching of basic theories.The students may have a solid theory foundation, but they're not good at finding problems, analyzing problems and solving problems.
The Ministry of Education mentioned that "facing the industry, the world and the future, a large number of various high-quality engineers with strong innovation ability should be cultivated to meet the needs of economic and social development" in the education program of outstanding engineers.Our college wants to implement the program as a breakthrough, promoting the reform and innovation of engineering education.do design, usually attend to one thing but lose sight of others.For instance, paying attention to the function but ignoring the form; paying attention to the form but also ignoring the spatial structure, materials and the surrounding environment, etc.The comprehensive capability required by architectural design includes the abilities of problem analysis, space imagination, design performance, innovation & practice, teamwork and so on (i.e., Table 1).The decomposed trainings in different courses and assignments which have been done before a composite design of small buildings can achieve better results.This is the method "breaking up the whole into parts, and conquering one by one".In the teaching process, the concepts of culture, region, energy, history and values should be added to each stage.We need to improve students' attention to society and direct them to reach a higher position to see a wider area.
The students would assimilate into society in a global perspective, and treat every design task seriously with multidimensional mode of thinking.Reforming the cultural method of design ability in architecture, will help students to do better in multiple cognition, cooperation and innovation, then they gradually give priority to the discussion of social problems.

Technical Assistance
Micro Learning Resource System has been set up by means of information technology.It provides a great number of videos in which knowledge and principle are taken as the main content in accordance with the structure of curriculum system for students to learn online.In this way, students could learn difficulties and priorities repeatedly on the basis of their own situation.And because of the preliminary study of the basic theory on the extracurricular, we have more time to develop skills and discuss problems in class.The students can also get more extended materials and receive assignments and feedbacks from the Micro Learning Resource System.Moreover, we are going to build a virtual laboratory for building structures, where students can use VR technology into a variety of building models in the future.The virtual laboratory will help them experience the inner space and observe the construction of the building nodes.Undoubtedly, it would greatly improve the efficiency of teaching.

Conclusion
Chinese society is facing the significant transformation with the rapid development of economy.The construction field will transition to the era of reconstruction and green renewal for existing buildings from the era of large-scale demolition and construction in the past.We do not lack of traditional architectural designers, but need a great deal of innovative design talents and practical engineering talents for the future.Therefore, architectural education must make corresponding changes starting from the junior professional courses, no longer just emphasizes the teaching of basic theoretical knowledge and skills.Instead, the original curriculum system in the training program would be adjusted to strengthen the cultivation of students' practice ability and innovation ability.The previous method, instruction in class by teacher and passive reception by students, cannot be used.The innovative design thinking of students is inspired through active experience, discussion and practice, the comprehensive quality of students is improved through decomposed trainings, and the professional vision is widened through supplementary frontier theory, all these attempts could better adapt to the development of the future society.
So we revise the training objectives of the junior design courses in architecture to place great emphasis on the cultivation of

Table 1 .
Abilities and trainings for architectural design and research