ZEMCH 2015 - International Conference Proceedings | Page 681

A third workshop was run with a cohort of 9 core target audience BA students (first year Architectural Technology) and the same brief as the second workshop. Issues of engagement with learning the software reflected on the results, with two students not completing one or both tasks,
while three more scored very low when using EnViz suggesting that they did not engage with
learning the software (something visible during the workshop). As a result the average scores of
the students when using EnViz were significantly lower (33%) (Figure 5). As before, all students
were more familiar with Excel than 3D modelling. However, when it came to evaluating the two
applications, all students rated EnViz more highly than the spreadsheet-based method, while
they found that it allowed them to work better in all aspects (Figures 6 and 7). It should be noted that these opinions were expressed anonymously, in order to allow students to express their
views candidly.
From a teaching perspective, while there were issues with engagement in learning the software,
which affected performance, as discussed above, it is important to note that most students appeared to enjoy the activity. The undergraduate students that completed these workshops as
part of a taught module appeared to have a better grasp of POE compared to students from
previous years, as evidenced in end-of-year assessments. They have also talked favourably about
the activity in informal discussions during the year. As the sample is very small, and the results
of the POE segment fall within a greater report, a quantitative study was judged to be of little
importance and benefit.

Conclusions
This paper presented a game devised to allow undergraduate students to understand better issues relating to building performance, POE surveys, and facilities management. The experiment
demonstrated both the advantages and challenges of gamification, in agreement with the experiences reported in the literature. The main advantage of the game approach appeared to be a
generally greater interest from the students in the topic. It is characteristic that most students engaged for a 90’ period in a topic which, when delivered in seminar form in previous years, did not
appear to hold equal interest. The event also appeared to be more memorable to the students,
probably due to the difference in format from the more standardised learning and teaching activities they covered in the rest of the year.
At the same time, gamification is not a panacea. The game needs to be carefully structured to
avoid overloading the students with information (as in the pilot study), and be entertaining and
intuitive while still enabling students to achieve the learning objectives. Finally, while gamification did appear to lead to greater engagement, students still need appropriate incentives to commit fully and can be strategic in their choice of engagement with a topic.
The second aim of the experiment, to allow comparison between the spreadsheet-based and
the 3d visualisation methods, was only partially achieved. The small sample, the different student
profiles, and the different levels of engagement meant that the results were different and with
significant standard deviation. Thus, Workshops 1 and 2 seemed to largely follow the results of the
more rigorous surveys. Workshop 3, however, showed that most students did not engage with the
visualisation software sufficiently to enable direct comparison. This is to be expected to an extent;
despite the conversation of the so-called “digital natives” in recent years, software fatigue appears
to be a phenomenon across almost all age brackets.

Using gamification to enhance understanding of building performance

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