The CoOL Studio research project is a cool way for architecture students to learn design. The project is so cool that it is one of two winning projects nationally in the AIA Education Honor Awards Competition held in July and the recipient of a 1999 Award for Architectural Research from Architecturemagazine, publicized in the April 1999 issue.

"CoOL Studio is the type of cutting-edge research that can revolutionize architecture education. It benefits students and those in the worldwide architecture community who want to share ideas, advice and interact with fresh, bright minds, possibly leading to future employment," said Thomas Galloway, dean of the College of Architecture at the Georgia Institute of Technology. "This research has enormous potential for education in general. But its potential impact in architecture education, that is in changing the ways students learn and faculty teach, is truly profound," he added.

Developed by Professors Sabir Kahn and Craig Zimring, researchers in the College of Architecture and technically supported by GVU and College of Computing faculty member Mark Guzdial,
CoOL Studio (Collaborative Online Studio for Architectural Design) is an on-line Internet community where architecture students learn the basics of architectural design. CoOL Studio is a collection of Internet "rooms" where students can post projects to solicit and monitor feedback from architects and consultants working in the field and from each other. The Internet enables those who are geographically distant to participate.

CoOL Studio is built on the CoWeb , a multimedia collaboration tool developed by Mark Guzdial and his Squeakers research group. The Squeakers' goal is to realize computing pioneer Alan Kay's "DynaBook" vision of multimedia educational computing as a collaborative medium. The CoWeb offers a high degree of flexibility with support for easily creating and sharing hypermedia. The CoWeb is being developed as an open-source project, and it is used in a dozen classes or more each term on Georgia Tech's campus, as well as in other universities and corporations around the world. Recent research papers on the CoWeb are available that describe its use in providing discussion spaces for Classroom 2000 classes, and even for use in a collaborative radio.

CoOL Studio is aimed at supporting input by distant consultants; providing access to online cases and reference materials; encouraging students to be clear and articulate about their projects; and supporting collaboration among students, design studios and within architectural schools themselves. CoOL Studio provides resources and tools for architecture studio students and faculty. In particular, it:

The challenge is to achieve these goals while allowing students and faculty to achieve their teaching and learning goals. These goals are achieved without imposing requirements for learning, nor by using technology that detracts from other, more important tasks.

The first test of CoOL Studio was done at Georgia Tech during Winter Quarter 1998, when a traditional graduate architecture studio was given access to the on-line environment. Students also had access to a CoWeb tool, developed by Guzdial, which allows for the easy creation and editing of web pages. As part of the class, students participated in an international student design competition where they were required to design a four-courtroom federal courthouse. Students used CoOL Studio to solicit feedback from consultants as they worked on their courthouse designs. Specifically, students posted their designs-in-progress to CoOL Studio where the virtual critics (consultants) and other students in the class could view them, offer comments and converse about aspects of their designs.

The development of CoOL Studio was supported by a Georgia Board of Regents Teaching and Learning grant. For more information about CoOL Studio, visit the CoOL Studio FrontPage.