Development of ecocampus: A prototype system for sustainable building design education

Students in architectural engineering and related disciplines need to develop critical design skills to be successful in their post-collegiate careers. Among these critical skills are the abilities to: create possible design concepts to address a given functional or programming requirement; understand what those concepts will look like in the context of an existing building or project site; and assess the benefits and deficiencies of the design concepts to determine the best possible design strategy. Existing technologies have been used to help students develop these skills through a mobile computer-based prototype, called ecoCampus. This computer application allowed students to: explore sustainable retrofit design possibilities for an existing building; visualize those design possibilities with marker-based augmented reality; and receive tailored performance feedback about the designs through a basic simulation game interface. This paper discusses the general workflow for creating this type of tool and the specific steps that were followed to develop ecoCampus. These steps include: identifying educational objectives; developing a list of functional requirements; developing the workflow for the educational design module; determining the development infrastructure for creating the application; developing the tool; and refining the initial prototype through iteration. This workflow is offered as a process that can successfully lead to a functional prototype as evidenced by the creation of ecoCampus, and can be used by future developers for creating similar technological tools applied to various educational disciplines.