Multidimensional digital game and learning space for basic design studio: Manifold Garden

This thesis addresses the integration of digital games into architectural education, aiming to overcome the barriers between students of the digital age and traditional educational systems. Students born into the digital era often struggle to adapt to rote-based learning approaches, prompting educators to develop alternative methods. In this context, digital game-based learning emerges as a prominent approach. This thesis examines the use of Manifold Garden, a spatial puzzle game, as an exercise in the basic design studio of architectural education. The Manifold Garden exercise, named "Yer-leş-ik" aims to transform space into a multilayered experiential and interactive domain by leveraging game mechanics such as gravity manipulation, infinite spaces, and recursive environments. The exercise requires students to reproduce a space that cannot exist in the real world, taking into account the importance of spatial elements such as walls, ceilings, stairs, ramps, light, and shadow. The study is based on data obtained from the Yer-leş-ik exercises, conducted in the Basic Design Studio course at TOBB University of Economics and Technology during the 2021-2022, 2022-2023, and 2023-2024 academic years. The data were collected from the Microsoft Teams platforms and the students' OneNote pages, used as an active communication tool during the courses. These data include student comments, visual and written content shared throughout the process, and the results of exercises. The study examines similarities and differences among the designs, students' design choices, problems encountered, solution strategies developed, the influence of previous works, and the reflection of the knowledge gained from the exercise in subsequent projects. The literature review and the results obtained from Yer-leş-ik exercise demonstrate that digital games offer a strong potential in the educational context. Manifold Garden provides first-year architecture students with a new experiential and interactive space where they can develop their spatial understanding from different perspectives. The Yer-leş-ik exercise, on the other hand, encourages students to approach a series of design problems arising from the integration of a digitally created space, governed by impossible physical rules, with the real world, prompting them to develop different strategies and view these problems from multiple angles. It was observed that many students benefited from their prior learning and transferred various insights gained from the Yer-leş-ik exercise to their subsequent projects.