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Research and applications related to Virtual Reality (VR) in the Architecture, Engineering, Construction and Facility Management (AEC/FM) industry are steadily increasing, being considered as one of the current trends in digital innovation. A convergence is currently on-going between Building Information Modelling (BIM), VR implementation and the soft landings principles, which highlight the need for a smooth transition from design to operation through the early involvement of clients and end-users. In particular, immersive virtual environments could allow stakeholders to experience the full-scale representation of a virtual facility prototype in an intuitive and engaging manner through immersion and sense of presence, promoting feedback collection during usability-focused design review meetings. On the other hand, despite the renewed interest in immersive VR, both technological and procedural challenges to its effective implementation still exist. The latter are within the scope of this study, which aims to address them in a systematic way as a comprehensive guideline for clients and design teams. This study describes the development of a VR-aided usability-focused design review session protocol for implementing immersive VR when clients and end-users are involved in design review meetings. It is the result of an inductive approach associated with qualitative research methods for data collection and data analysis. A case study has been selected as a main research method for facing the first step into the research problem. A further iteration of data collection and analysis was adopted to guarantee the validity of the research, including talks with experts and literature comparison. Finally, the session protocol has been developed in the form of a process map representing all the necessary phases and activities to consider for the effective adoption of immersive VR to evaluate design intents with clients and end-users. As a comprehensive summary, the session protocol fills a gap in the research on the adoption of virtual reality in the AEC industry, which was lacking a prescriptive and structured process to drive the effective use of this technology in collaborative meetings and decision-making processes.

The design of software is known to be difficult for novice computer scientists. In this paper, we focus on software redesign and on the refactoring necessary to implement a redesign. Redesigning an application aims to improve non-functional aspects such as extensibility, without changing the functionality. Redesign is a complex task, involving knowledge and skills from software design in general and the use of design patterns in particular. This study is part of an educational design research project aiming at developing scaffolding for students’ software redesign activities in the form of procedural guidance. We investigated students’ strategies and usage of concepts during a software redesign assignment using students’ reports and team colllaboration recordings as data sources, thus focusing on the process instead of on the design results, in contrast with existing studies. We identified several difficulties that can serve as starting points for procedural guidance. For instance, students seem to avoid using a structured analysis method. Our findings indicate that students’ activities were mainly directed towards the code rather than the design problem.

Programming is a complex task, which should be taught using authentic exercises, with supportive information and procedural information. Within the field of Computer Science, there are few examples of procedural information that guide students in how to proceed while solving a problem. We developed such guidelines for programming tasks in JavaScript, for students who have already learned to program using an object oriented language.Teaching JavaScript in an academic setting has advantages and disadvantages. The disadvantages are that the language is interpreted so there is no compiler to check for type errors, and that the language allows many ‘awful’ constructs. The advantage is that, because of those disadvantages, programmers should consciously apply rules for ‘good’ programs, instead of being able to rely on the errors and warnings that a compiler will raise.In this article, we show how we guide students to develop elegant code in JavaScript, by giving them a set of guidelines, and by advising a process of repeated refactoring until a program fulfills all requirements. To show that these guidelines work, we describe the development of a generic module for client-side form validation. The process followed and the resulting module both are valuable in an educational setting. As an example, it shows and explains precisely to students how such a module can be developed by following our guidelines, step by step.