Teaching with elementsDB
Over three years we taught the theory of and applications for elementsdb in courses in landscape architecture, urban design, planning, environmental design and agro-ecology. We concurrently improved the content, interface and added tutorials.
Project Profile
Sponsors:
2010-2013 UBC Teaching and Learning Enhancement Fund
Project Team
Faculty
Cynthia Girling
Maged Senbel
Ronald Kellett
Paula Farrar (UBC Librarian)
Kev Madill (UBC Librarian)
Research Assistants
Michael van der Laan
Mesa Sheriff
Negin Shakibi
Jeanie Lim
Grant Hainsworth
Nicholas Sinkewicz
James T. White
Phil Riley
Kate Sloan
Annie Jensen
Amy Ashmore
Other Teaching Faculty
Sarah Church, Virginia Barr, Patrick Condon, Scott Hein, Erick Villagomez
Teaching Assistants
Mesa Sheriff, Rebecca Colter, Nicholas Sinkewicz, Laura Kozak
“Engaging students with the environmental dimensions of urban design via the web” applied, evaluated, and expanded elementsdb in courses and design studios at UBC. Through this resource, students were introduced to rigorous digital design precedents, through an interface that is interactive and models that can be manipulated. elementsdb helped students to attain literacy and familiarity with abstract, empirical and three-dimensional information about the forms and systems that make up cities.
Through this project, we also added tutorials, refined protocols for students to create cases, and added building energy content to elementsdb. We trained faculty /teaching assistant (TA) teams to use elementsdb in their courses to expand students knowledge base about the form and metrics of urban sustainability. Students themselves engaged in critical cross-disciplinary consideration of the complex factors of urban sustainability, and some students assisted with database creation and evaluation.
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Except where otherwise noted, the original work by Cynthia Girling and Ronald Kellett presented on this website is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
elementslab is an applied urban design and environment research group in the School of Architecture + Landscape Architecture and the Centre for Interactive Research in Sustainability at the University of British Columbia.