Collaborative design of an active learning classroom with high school students and teachers

PurposeThe aim of this study is to understand classroom settings desired by high school students and teachers in an active learning classroom. The research question is whether students and teachers will differ from each other when designing an active learning classroom.Design/methodology/approachIn an effort to design a learning environment for an advanced placement programme, action research methodology was followed by conducting a participatory workshop in a real active learning classroom with future users. Working in isolation from one another, students and teachers designed their own classrooms by forming different learning centres. During the study, two groups, made up of ten high school students and seven teachers, respectively, were asked to arrange the furniture in an active learning classroom. The groups were free to form as many furniture arrangement configurations as they wished and were asked to write about their workshop experiences afterwards. Once they had completed both tasks, their plan layouts were examined.FindingsAll of the plan layouts were found to fall into one of three categories: a traditional layout, a small group layout or a single large group layout. The written texts were also analysed, which revealed different perspectives of each participating group. As students and teachers explore different learning opportunities, they appear to be driven by different kinds of experiences when they endeavour to organize their classrooms.Originality/valueNever before has an active learning classroom been the site for a participatory furniture arrangement workshop that employs teachers and students.

Space configuration and learning comfort; a case study of Federal University of Technology Minna lecture halls

This research pursuit the objectives of testing and measuring the level of indoor environmental quality in the lecture theatres across the university; analysing the challenges of the learning component that affects the learning process and appraise the learning space configuration that best suits the learning process of the students in various lecture halls. This research employed empirical research method involving questionnaires and scientific measurement of the acoustic level, thermal comfort level, lighting and particulate matter 2.5, 1.0 and 10. The research results show that the various learning spaces have good orientation and are adequately ventilated. The thermal comfort of most of the lecture halls reduces in the afternoon. The furniture arrangement within the lecture spaces reduced the level of interaction amongst the students and between lecturers and students. Therefore, this paper recommends effective artificial cooling must be introduced in the afternoon and the ergonomics within the lecture halls must be made flexible. Keywords: Space configuration; Technology; Minna

Computational fluid dynamics evaluation of the furniture arrangement for ventilation efficiency

People spend most of their time indoors; therefore, maintaining a good indoor air quality and meeting the requirements of comfort and energy efficiency are essential. One of the most widespread strategies to achieve this objective is improving ventilation efficiency; therefore, the main aim of this study was to show an optimization of the ventilation efficiency, in a specific room, considering 47 variations (case studies) in the furniture arrangement. For this purpose, a numerical analysis using computational fluid dynamics techniques, validated by the tracer gas decay technique, was used to assess the distribution of the age of air within the space. The concept of “age of air” was implemented in the computational fluid dynamics code through user-defined functions, using the steady-state method based on the resolution of a transport equation for an additional scalar. Variations up to 5.75% in the ventilation efficiency between the cases studied have been achieved. It is concluded that an improvement up to 1.65% can be obtained when the elements of the study are introduced in a way that facilitates the air movement towards the exhaust; therefore, improvement of the ventilation efficiency through specific furniture distributions is possible, although not significant, according to the outcomes.