Experiential Learning for Teaching Heating, Ventilation, and Air-conditioning Engineering

In this Work in Progress Innovative Practice paper, we describe a teaching and learning facility that is being developed to test the effectiveness of using full-scale heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning (HVAC) systems, and hands-on activity with these systems and their components, to improve learning outcomes. This facility is being developed to support the mission of an architectural engineering program, whose graduates normally practice engineering as building designers after their formal education. One hypothesis in this work is that interacting with these systems will increase the pace of learning, facilitating a rapidly expanding set of knowledge that is required for effective building design, compared with the status quo lecture and textbook delivery methods. Another hypothesis in this work is that the hands-on activity, and reflection on this activity, will lead to increased recruitment to, and retention within, programs that teach HVAC. This paper provides a background on this engineering specialization and the importance of effective education within it, then describes a novel educational facility that is being developed, the program in which it will be deployed, and describes results of a survey that revealed the need for this type of activity. The educational facility includes a full-scale functional HVAC system, of the type used in medium and large commercial buildings, that is housed within the learning facility, but not used by the facility for actual space conditioning, so that students can experiment freely, and have complete access to the system. Additional purpose-built equipment modules address specific learning objectives. These teaching innovations are being used to augment several existing courses in HVAC, as well as providing the basis for a new course that has been developed. The effectiveness of the innovations will be assessed, so that the methods and tools can be improved and generalized for wider scale. adoption.