Many thanks for your response Krishnan.  Yes, I agree that we should give more productive decision opportunities to our students; I often share research with my students from undergraduate to postgraduate level, because I wish them to be more inquisitive themselves. I always enjoy their critical evaluations of projects.

Today, the amount of drawing board practice can be severely

reduced. However exercises such as learning to measure up,

and learning common metrics, such as the sizes of standard

doors still need to be emphasized.

I do not think that a heavy history of architecture is important, but knowing and naming historical trends and practices helps communication

and prevents reinventing the door.

Practice in 3-D and solving interference and detailling problems is vital.

Modern modelling, materials and methods are vital. Production techniques, workflow, and critical path programming are crucial. Services must not be overlooked.

Site visits and practical vacation work are essential, as are lectures from invited speakers.

Videos bring to the class the design and making of buildings that

are now completed in foreign countries, climes and cultures.

Many thanks Ian. Your response is reinforcing my own opinion and teaching methods. I have always tried to embed mostly history and theory of architecture in studio time in order to keep it as inspirational field for the students; we also teach technological developments as part of history and theory. However sometimes students manage to achieve better quality of designs, when they experience other discipline's explorative methods to find interesting concepts alongside applications of technology and technical information on metrics. Instead of drawing and repeating indexes and catalogues of doors, perhaps students should spend a bit more time to understand the ergonomics of human bodies moving into spaces and defining places to live and act. My case is that, most of the time, we keep students for many hours in front of a screen or on a drawing board and ask them to draw, instead of asking them to design architecture and urban space after they have experienced with all their senses what city means and what human beings are expecting cities to offer them as livable and healthy places.

• Enabling two-way communication between real people, whether in real time or not. Failing that, simulating the richness of two-way person-to-person communication with the computer via narrative devices, visual and interface design, and the underlying information architecture, is a common way to automate what is otherwise time and resource-intensive.
• Offering the user "productive decision-making opportunities". This means going beyond offering menus of choices to select from, and involves providing an infrastructure for helping the user to construct their own chain of inference and meaning. Giving the user the ability to experience the consequences of their choices is at the heart of state-of-the-art interactivity and game-based learning theory.
• Giving the user something to do rather than something to see. Manipulation of objects and ideas that produce a new construct is crucial to a strong form of interactivity. Merely manipulating an interface widget is not in and of itself interactive in a meaningful way.

http://www.eduweb.com/practice_teach_full.html

Many thanks for your response Krishnan.  Yes, I agree that we should give more productive decision opportunities to our students; I often share research with my students from undergraduate to postgraduate level, because I wish them to be more inquisitive themselves. I always enjoy their critical evaluations of projects.

Sure Eleni productive decision opportunities creates avenues to explore, more than that as teachers we assume the role of parents in seeing the students evolve by learning and equipping themselves to face the future, through these facilitation's; this gives satisfaction in our work.

Many thanks, dear colleagues, for your comments and suggestions for further reading.