Our sustainable campus: developing a technology-assisted interactive self-guided learning tour of University of Edinburgh’s sustainable buildings

School:  Edinburgh College of Art

Team Members:  W. Victoria Lee, Iraklis Pantopoulos

Abstract

Buildings contribute to around 40% of the global CO2 emission. Architecture education institutions across the globe are undergoing a curriculum reform in response to the climate emergency. For students to internalise scientific information imparted in lectures into knowledge that they can implicitly apply to their own designs, the learning of sustainability principles needs to be grounded in concrete experiences such as field visits of successful built works. Building visits for large groups – as is the case for the student cohorts at the University of Edinburgh School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture (ESALA) – can be onerous and impractical in the age of pandemic. This project aims to develop an interactive mobile applet for self-guided learning tours that will enable students to visit and experience sustainable buildings by themselves at their own pace.

The University of Edinburgh campuses have several buildings with verified sustainability performance. This project will develop an interactive applet for touring three of these buildings using the University’s supported authoring software Xerte. The tours will be piloted as part of a second year undergraduate course in the architecture degree programme in Semester 1 AY2022-2023. Via course feedback surveys and focus groups, this project will examine the efficacy of these interactive self-guided tours in enhancing the learning of sustainability for undergraduate architecture students. The findings will be disseminated at the 2023 Learning and Teaching Conference. A version of the applet will also be made available as part of University’s Open Educational Resources (OER) collection.