Virtual House of the Future During the Global Warming Era

Abstract

Problem-Based Learning (PBL) is important for engineering education as well as for creative engineering design. It provides students with challenging, ill-structured problems that relate to their daily lives. The students receive guidance from their instructors and work cooperatively in a group to seek solutions to the problems. PBL has been used to successfully carry out many experiments in the real world and is beneficial in the virtual world too. The virtual world is especially desirable for solving problems that are too dangerous, too time consuming, and too expensive for the real world. For example, it could be used as a location for designing and building structures such as bridges, large buildings and houses. Student teams from the United States and Japan separately tackled the following problem. What will the typical house look like in the near future during the Global warming period? They managed to design and build their houses in Second Life (a three-dimensional virtual community) by using virtual objects called primitives [1–3].

Students design and build environmentally friendly houses for the future using primitives in SL.