A Sustainable STEM Learning Environment

Learning from and building upon the previous case studies and research compiled, we propose design guidelines for new STEM learning environments that both leverage and are leveraged by sustainable building practices, forming a symbiotic relationship between the built and natural environment that further enhances the student learning experience. With sustainable design no longer being just an option, but a necessity, the architecture of STEM learning environments has the opportunity to serve as a pedagogical tool, providing students with a real-world illustration of sustainable processes that work with and not against nature.

This enhancement of the learning environment from being a passive setting to an active teaching tool allows the architecture to serve as a canvas for students to explore and test projects, manipulating their own built environment as a testbed for addressing the urgent environmental issues of today. It is with this approach that students will become more engaged and see the correlation between the curriculum and the real-world setting in which these learned principles are put on display and experimented with directly in the classroom.

The following analysis at multiple scales, from macro-level building typologies down to micro-level sustainable material choices, attempts to provide a strategy for implementing the fusion and synergy of sustainable design with the architectural design of STEM learning environments. The goal is to then design and test a built environment based on these guidelines in the near future.