Lessons Learned During the Construct of a Brain Measuring Activity to Improve Construction Workforce Development

Construction work-force development programs exist at high school, trade schools, community college and universities. Theses graduates going the construction industry have to make decisions daily that directly impact different aspects of the construction projects. For some of those decisions, the ability to solve mathematical operations both simple and complex plays an important role. Thus, the objective of this paper is to describe the setup of an experiment activities implementing Functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy (fNIRS) to measure the brain activity while solving mathematical operations required in some of the construction decisions. The experiment was setup using the conceptual analysis research methodology. Because, it allowed to critically examine and clarify the important elements needed to measure the brain activity while solving math problems which are very important in construction decisions. The result in this paper described lessons learned during the construction of the brain measuring activities and pseudo-code implemented in PyschoPy. The intellectual merit of this research project is its contribution to the field of construction management by providing a specific approach to measure brain activity for decision making that would lead to improve work-force development. Ultimately, the broad impact of this project is the ability for the construction community to have a better understanding of decision making that could lead to innovations in content delivery in construction work-force development programs.