Serious Fun: Pervasive game design as a CAAD teaching and research method

Abstract

Today and in the future, architectural students must be prepared for designing both physical and adaptive, computer-integrated spaces. The question is: How do we easily and effectively convey architecturally relevant theories and practices of pervasive computing in teaching? In this paper, we present a didactic model that has proved to be a possible answer. During a semester long design class, we supervised an interdisciplinary group of architecture and computer science students who teamworked on an early so called serious pervasive game prototype, entitled “ETHGame”. The class culminated in a two week compact phase and a presentation before ETH representatives involved in e-learning projects. The resulting interactive prototype takes advantage of our campus’s extensive wireless local area network infrastructure, allowing for user positioning and location based learning, servicing, and peer-to-peer communication. The game mutates the whole of the ETH Zurich campus into a knowledge space, issuing position dependent and position relevant questions to players. The ETHGame forces participants to engage with a given space in the form of a quiz and rewards them for collaborating both face-to-face and facelessly. The game helps them build a collective academic and space aware identity whilst being immersed in a sentient environment. Thus, in this paper we are introducing serious pervasive game design as a novel design research and teaching paradigm for CAAD, as well as a e-learning design strategy.