ZEMCH 2015 - International Conference Proceedings | Page 678

spite the students reporting a greater familiarity with Excel than 3D tools before the experiment).
Following the pilot study, a number of decisions were taken:
• the game was simplified removing the coefficient of the importance of a space. All spaces
were given equal importance with regard to points.
• an interactive system was built for logging the points (Figure 4). With this, the students could
see immediately the area factor of a space, and the cost effects the space had. Thus no student
would now be over budget.

Figure 4: Snapshot of the interactive game environment given to the students

Second and Third Workshops
Two workshops were run with the new design. The first took place with a cohort of 12 students
enrolled on an Environmental Design and Engineering Masters programme at a second UK University. As this group had already taken a semester-long module covering POE and while outside
the core target group, it was decided that it would be interesting to gauge if they performed
differently, as a benchmark exercise
As the voluntary workshop took place outside a taught module, the incentives for committing to
the game were therefore lower. The top three students would have their scores published on the
virtual learning environment of the related module. Potentially due to the low incentives to commit to the game, som e students did not complete one of the components, did not engage fully, or
broke the core rules (e.g. collaborated on one or more activities). All students were nevertheless
allowed to remain for the entire duration as the educational component was considered more
important than strict enforcement of the rules.
Among those who completed both components according to the rules, there was a marginally
better performance when using EnViz, of approximately 7.5% when comparing averages (Figure

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ZEMCH 2015 | International Conference | Bari - Lecce, Italy