I'm Russell Lowe.
I'm a Senior Lecturer at the Architecture Program in the Faculty of the Built Environment.
I've been working with computer game engines to create innovative environments for teaching
and learning.
And I've been doing that in collaboration with Sidney Newton, who is an Associate Professor
in the Construction Management Program.
The particular technologies that we introduced into the courses that I do all relate to computer
gaming technology.
So they're what's called computer game engines.
What they allow is the modification of an off-the-shelf computer game into something
else.
So examples of that are in first year in Architecture Studio the students take away all of the ordinary
assets in a game which sort of has military inspired jeeps and weapons and things like
that and they put in their own landscapes and their own custom architecture.
In that way we can get inside the environment and walk around it and assess the students'
design work from a point of actually being there from a first person experience.
Or another course that we use the technology in is called the Collaboration Studio.
That's an architectural computing course.
In that course we've taken one of the game engines and repurposed it so that it becomes
a facsimile of a real construction site.
What is interesting about that is that student is creating learning materials for other students.
So these are architectural computing students creating a construction site that has all
of the things you would expect on a construction site of a building in varying states of completion.
You'll see concrete mixers.
You will see people laying concrete.
You will see builders sawing timber and negotiating deals in a site office.
Things like that.
And then what they've done is they've created those environments and those environments
are destined for students of construction management.
So those students, they're not able to get out onto a real site anymore for varying kinds
of reasons.
It's very difficult to get students that authentic learning experience that we would have gotten
on a real construction site.
So what the architectural computing students are doing is creating an authentic environment
with buildings that look like real buildings, that are built to the standard of a real building
and have all of the things that you would find on a regular construction site.
And so the construction students are able to, as simply as users, get inside the environment
and explore it for as long as they like and in a way that is comfortable for them, and
in a way to find out the information that we ordinarily would have given them in a textbook.
The construction students, they're using a game engine purely as one would use a game.
They're not creating the game itself.
They are users of the environment.
But they're able to see things on a construction site that just really wouldn't be available
to them in any other way.
So imagine if we were to take students to a construction site-- for one, they are quite
dangerous.
And for two, and probably more importantly, is that we're really limited by the construction
schedules of the person who is running the site.
If we have in a course-- in week 1 we would talk about foundations and week 2 we might
talk about the subfloor.
Week 3, the floor.
Week 4, the framing for the walls.
And you can see how that builds up in terms of a sequence going from the bottom of the
building right up through to the roof.
But if you've got a building site that you are able to go to, and you've got a schedule
for your own class, the odds that your schedule lines up with the construction schedule is
almost a million to one.
So what we can do with these environments is actually sequence them in such a way that
a student will get the experience of the building site at the same time or an appropriate time
compared to their learning development.
We are finding students have wonderful responses to these advantages.
In the architecture studio, it's amazing the level of detail that students get to in terms
of how their architecture relates to the landscape around it.
The particular game engine we're using at the moment is really brilliant in terms of
its landscape formation.
And the students are by themselves taking that opportunity on board and creating the
most interesting relationships between architecture and the surrounding land form.