The development of a gaming environment for teaching integrated building systems and sustainable design

The project addresses a number of critical national issues. The project will significantly improve the effectiveness of teaching building technology, systems integration and energy issues architecture programs across the nation. The Building Literacy pedagogy and gaming software are designed to increase students' comprehension, problem solving capacity, and most importantly, ability to apply learned principles to building design. The impacts of improving architectural technology capacity could be profound. First, given the size of the built environment as energy and materials consuming sector, raising architectural capacity to design more efficient and sustainable buildings will have a significant impact on national energy consumption. Given current geo-political conditions, taking important steps to improve national energy independence has become a national security issue. Second, practicing architects will be faced with lower in-service training costs. With better prepared graduating students, architecture firms will not have to incur the costs of providing technical training to new hires. The Project's Evaluation Plan is designed to investigate these suppositions by implementing and measuring the project impact on teaching and learning within the University at Buffalo and University of Utah. However, since the project is in its initial stages of development, there has not been an opportunity to implement the project.