Architectural design game: A serious game approach to promote teaching and learning using multimodal interfaces

The present article introduces and develops an educational tool as an interactive digital game for architectural design, allowing the architectural students to challenge their knowledge and experiences. The framework of this educational tool supports a serious open-ended game, which helps students get involved with the game through self-assessment and a multi-modal natural user interface, including gesture recognition and speech recognition in a familiar CAD environment without any right or wrong solutions. The students can immediately compare their game results with the architecture of iconic buildings and get familiar with the complexity of the design process through five different games in the initial version of this tool without the fear of being judged. According to the results of the questionnaire, this tool can simulate the design process, enhance its quality, and thus, assist the learners with developing their required skills with a wide variety of motivations and opportunities for engagement while helping them connect their experiences and activities to their learning and development in a meaningful way to fill the gap between their knowledge acquisition and knowledge application.