Leveling Up Architectural Education: Online Immersion Using Gaming Environments

The recent COVID pandemic has demonstrated that distance learning is no longer a function of broadcasting conventional classroom content to a decentralized audience. Rather than perpetuate disengaged dissemination of content commonplace in in-person teaching environments, educators have aspired to elicit engagement with diverse and rich content available on the internet. This is merely a harbinger of increased demand by students and educators alike for more robust and interactive content. To meet this ambition, an initiative to create a virtual simulation for architecture students to immerse themselves in a historic Canadian First Nations settlement from centuries in the past to better understand the parallels between indigenous approaches to architecture and contemporary praxis. Drawing upon video game infrastructure, the downloadable content fostered accurate and detailed depictions of various building systems as reconstructed as a collaboration between architecture, archaeology, and game design faculty. Rather than simply presented with authoritative facts, within this highly detailed open world, students were able to engage and explore content on their own in understanding the commonalities with contemporary design strategies that provided a greater experiential learning capacity.