Design and Development of a Virtual Reality Educational Game for Architectural and Construction Reviews

The growing adoption of building information modeling platforms in the construction industry requires instructors to design and leverage innovative pedagogical interventions. Furthermore, construction instructors must support their students in gaining essential problemsolving skills such as the analysis and evaluation of proposed construction and design solutions. In this study, the research team aimed at designing and developing an educational virtual reality game to support students in evaluating and reviewing BIM-based design of residential buildings. Research has illustrated that reviewing designs using traditional methods, such as drawings, can tax a students’ cognitive process. To tackle this issue, the team has developed the Design Review Simulator (DRS), a virtual reality educational simulation game. The learning objectives of the game are to support students in developing evaluation and reviewing skills of mistakes in construction projects through the use of virtual reality. We used a five-phase instructional design framework – A.D.D.I.E. – to analyze, design, develop, implement and evaluate the DRS game. Currently, the authors have performed the first three phases of the A.D.D.I.E. process. In the (1) analysis phase, the team evaluated literature, the future users of the games, and defined learning objectives. We then (2) designed and (3) developed the DRS in the Unity 3D game engine. The design proposal used as a test bed for this project was a residential townhouse in the heart of the San Francisco Bay Area and the BIM model was developed in Autodesk Revit. The model was provided by a local architectural firm specialized in renovations and retrofits. The team and the architects selected this model due to the high presence of modeling mistakes, making it effective example for educational purposes. The paper reports the analysis, design, and development efforts of the DRS in order to support other instructors and designers in developing future virtual reality games for construction education. Therefore, this experience’s contribution provides a direction to future game developers in designing similar educational virtual reality games.