FROM PHYSICAL TO VIRTUAL: A CASE STUDY ON TEACHING NANOTECHNOLOGIES AND FUNCTIONAL MATERIALS FOR DESIGN WITH SMART LESSONS

It is a quite long tradition for lesson upon materials in the design school to have a hands-on practice with materials samples during the lessons to give students a tangible correspondence between theory and practice. The main limitation of this approach is the necessity of sharing the same physical room during the lesson. COVID-19 pandemic emergency in 2020 is pushing institutions all around the globe to close schools and universities in order to limit the spread of the virus, allowing an increasing digitalised way to deliver lessons. In this paper, the authors examine the possibility to provide in online courses all the content that is traditionally shared with a physical interaction. Several new tools and approaches have been exploited to make students understand and get involved into the discovery of technical and “sensorial” properties of the materials even without the physical samples to interact with. An analysis of main advantages and disadvantages of the proposed online lesson procedure have been deeply explored and reported into the current paper, including lesson modalities, typology of information provided to students, as well as the audience’s feedback. At last, a comparison between physical and virtual lesson modes is here presented and discussed.