Virtual Coach: a situational simulation environment for construction management education

Abstract

The traditional construction education model based on precise, well-defined problems and formal definitions is not satisfactorily fulfilling its mission of educating the decision-makers of tomorrow. This realization has moved several researchers to explore alternatives where problem solving is carried out in conjunction with the environment and concepts are embedded in the context promoting learning within the nexus of the activity. Several efforts have been undertaken to develop these environments resulting in a variety of special-purpose situational simulations. However, special-purpose situational simulations exhibit inherent limitations related to their application breadth, flexibility, and promotion of collaborations. These limitations cannot be resolved within the framework of special-purpose learning environments. A general-purpose environment is required to overcome these shortcomings and take full advantage of the situational learning paradigm. This paper presents theoretical aspects related to situational simulation environments as the conceptual framework to introduce a pilot application called Virtual Coach. The implementation and preliminary evaluation of this software system are also discussed in this paper.