SimBuilding funded by the National Science Foundation

A thermal bridge simulation in SimBuilding

Building science is, to a large extent, a “black box” to many students, as it involves many invisible physical processes such as thermal radiation, heat transfer, air flow, and moisture transport that are hard to imagine. But students must learn how these processes occur and interact within a building in order to understand how design, construction, operation, and maintenance affect them and, therefore, the wellbeing of the entire building. These processes form a “science envelope” that is much more difficult to understand than the shape of the building envelope alone. With 3D graphics that can visualize these invisible processes in a virtual building, simulation games provide a promising key to open the black box. They offer a highly interactive learning environment in which STEM content and pedagogy can be embedded in the gameplay, game scores can be aligned to educational objectives to provide formative assessments, and students can be enticed to devote more time and explore more ramifications than didactic instruction. A significant advantage is that students can freely experiment with a virtual building to learn a concept before exploring it in a real building with all the consequences and costs that may entail.

A new grant ($900K) from the National Science Foundation will allow us to develop a simulation game engine called SimBuilding based on computational building simulation. The application of advanced building simulation technologies to developing training simulation games will be an original contribution of this project. Although building simulation has become an important tool in the industry and can be very helpful in understanding how a building works, it has never been used to build simulation games before. SimBuilding will unveil this untapped instructional power. Furthermore, this game engine will be written in JavaScript and WebGL, allowing it to run on most computing devices.

Amanda Evans, Director of Center of Excellence for Green Building and Energy Efficiency at Santa Fe Community College in New Mexico, will be our collaborator on this grant.