As part of the foundational education of an architect, students are introduced to abstract concepts in design and technology. Students, for example, may be expected to understand the load flow in a building, while not truly understanding the parts of the building conveying that load. To begin to address this disconnect, a team from architecture and civil engineering constructed a virtual reality environment based on a campus building for the purpose of educational research. This model allows students to explore and participate with various structural concepts in a building’s structure which was also accessible to them on campus. The research team then designed an educational study and tested whether interacting with the virtual reality environment aided students in obtaining a more advanced three-dimensional understanding of building structure. The singular model environment was developed to be tested in both an architecture and engineering class and to meet the needs of the two levels of students (sophomore and senior year). This paper outlines the educational research project through several mechanisms including the project team as well as the funding. The ethical considerations of student research will be discussed through elements of the institutional review board review and requirements. The testing evaluations, surveys, and analysis will be presented. The results of the architectural class 2025 participation reveal that the VR module may support student learning, and that the comfort of the student of the technology has an influence. Further, the majority of the students supported VR as an educational tool. Lastly, the paper will share the challenges of such a research project, highlight possible changes, and reflect on the lessons learned. The position of the conference recognizes that big changes happen with smaller localized solutions. This paper suggests that even in education, a local position can help students grapple with larger concepts.

This paper presents a graduate design studio that integrated computational design, clay 3D printing, and environmental testing to teach climate-responsive architecture in the semi-arid context of West Texas. As global cooling demand is projected to triple by mid-century, the studio examined how small-scale ceramic evaporative cooling systems can function as low-energy alternatives to mechanical HVAC while serving as instruments for climate literacy. Using locally sourced clay, students designed modular systems that manipulated porosity, surface area, capillarity, and water retention. Prototypes were fabricated with a PotterBot 10 Pro clay printer and evaluated in a custom-built wind chamber that measured temperature and relative humidity.

Three projects titled Woven Tile, Ceramic Bloom, and OctaHive demonstrate how digital fabrication can reinterpret vernacular cooling strategies through iterative cycles of modeling, making, testing, and refinement. Each project employed distinct geometric logics to balance surface exposure and internal void volume. Four-hour environmental tests recorded temperature reductions of five to six degrees Fahrenheit and relative humidity increases of up to seventeen percent, confirming measurable evaporative effects under controlled airflow conditions. Variations in cooling duration and intensity revealed clear relationships between geometry, material mass, and moisture retention.

The studio positions fabrication as a mode of climate inquiry, linking digital decisions directly to physical performance. By engaging clay, water, and airflow as active design variables, students developed an evidence-based understanding of passive cooling and environmental feedback. The resulting workflow combines local materials, computational modeling, and accessible testing infrastructure to offer a replicable pedagogical model for teaching climate-responsive design through place-based experimentation and measurable performance.

This continuing research argues for an alternative instructional model integrating active, embodied graphics for introductory architectural structures. This teaching and learning model is designed to improve upon the conventional lecture-drill format by combining different aspects of modern pedagogy, such as multimedia-associative learning, embodied learning, and collaborative learning. The research limits its scope to the initial structural topics which challenge many architecture students: forces, equilibrium of forces, and simple truss analysis for internal forces.

The modified model of instruction and the methodology for gathering data, refined 2018-2019, were used to answer whether the integration of active, embodied graphic techniques contributed to the students’ learning performance. Two small-medium sized classes each year, from 2021 to 2025, form the sample population. This present iteration assigns “control” to the computation-dominant Method of Joints (MoJt) and assigns “intervention” to the graphics-dominant Maxwell Diagram (MaxD) method. Students, instructed in both approaches, select their preferred analysis method to employ in their assessment. Using the midterm test’s major task of simple truss analysis for internal forces, performances were evaluated based on completed task processes, outputs, and efficiency.

The research hypothesized that the learning method integrating graphics-actions would both perform better and be much preferred by students. Data has so far shown that preference for the proposed graphics-active method is not decisive and may be influenced by less tangible social and naturalistic factors in the students’ overall learning environment. However, findings across the last five years do point to the graphical MaxD approach outperforming the conventional MoJ approach in terms of correctness of analyses, as well as efficiency of task completion.

With these initial results suggesting better performance, the findings lend support for the integration of active, embodied graphics-actions into the instructional approaches for introductory architectural structures, indicating the position that visual-biased learners may benefit from correspondingly graphics-attuned pedagogical strategies.