Tangible user interfaces for teaching building physics: Towards continuous designing in education

Abstract

This paper follows our evaluation and research into designing tangible physical media for the purposes of teaching building physics to undergraduate architecture students. These media interfaces make use of a virtual environment to promote an understanding of the cycles, which govern architectural and urban projects (for example solar studies, the flow of heat, air and water). This project aims to create an ecology of devices which can be used by students to self-direct themselves and harbour critical making in their research methods (with the explicit intent of dissolving the barrier between design and research). The basic premise of this research, is that in light of growing student numbers, more students lacking confidence in numeracy skills as well as the desire to have self-directed or group-directed learning, tangible media has a promising role to play. There are several reasons for this optimism. The first is that a better sense of intuition is gained from an interactive model over reading notes from a lecture or textbook. The second is that tangible media engages in other modes of learning, being valuable to students who have an aptitude for kinesthetic and spatial learning over text-dominant learning.