SIXXIGames: Serious games to educate young architects and structural engineers

Construction History traditionally requires special tools of study. In the historical and technical inquiries on works, historical sources like drawings and documents are, often, not enough to understand and to represent the real process of construction and its relationship with architectural and structural solutions: the experimentation on customized tools of inquiry has been consolidated, over the years, as an autonomous field of research based on the combined use of “re-drawing” and “physical models”. This paper focuses on the introduction of 3D printed physical models for the study of Construction History, their pedagogical application as tools of teaching and their (un-expected) development as Serious Games to educate young architects and structural engineers, even in order to increase knowledge on Engineering Heritage. The research was developed within the SIXXI project “SIXXI - XX Century Structural Engineering: the Italian contribution”, thanks to an ERC Advanced Grant (PI Sergio Poretti, Tullia Iori).