Teaching Building Sciences in Immersive Environments: A Prototype Design, Implementation, and Assessment

ABSTRACT Immersive technologies are transforming all aspects of daily life. In educational context, augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) offer the promise of experiential learning, where the real world is enhanced with information and graphics or is completely simulated. The project described in this paper, builds on advances of these technologies to develop, implement, and test “Skope,” a prototype immersive learning environment. Skope is designed to facilitate interdisciplinary education of architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) students for design and construction of environmentally sustainable buildings. The Skope learning environment is comprised of an AR and a VR visualization tool as well as learning modules that contain interdisciplinary content. Skope is implemented and tested in three interdisciplinary AEC classes. Quantitative and qualitative analyses of student performance in these classes suggest that Skope has a positive impact and increased students’ motivation and understanding of building science principles, ultimately leading to an improvement of learning across domains. In addition, findings of this research indicate that using Skope improves students’ attitude toward collaborative learning.