Learning Performance of Teaching Practice of Friendly Senior Care Space Design

Taiwan is an aging society, but the appropriate designs must be considered in senior care spaces. Universal design knowledge has been addressed in universities, but students cannot imagine how age affects the needs of senior citizens physically and psychologically. The teaching practice in this study adopted a dyadic teaching method whereby students observed the needs of individuals in a nursing care center for elderly people. It also used cooperative learning methods for nursing students to discuss the needs of senior citizens and to help design students understand the lifestyles of senior citizens through the use of simulation devices. Through the feedback from the learning process, statistical analysis was used to assess the learning performance of students. The design studio used these two teaching methods, and the respective work was entered into an open design competition to verify whether teaching performance was successful. Approximately 70% of the works earned design awards. This provided a preliminary validation of the success of the respective teaching practice method.