Virtual Laboratories for a Course on Indoor Environmental Quality

The author teaches a course on Indoor Environmental Quality in the Master and Ph. D. programs on Energy for Sustainability in the University of Coimbra, Portugal. In the teaching methodology of this course there is a coexistence of the different approaches commonly used to deal with engineering problems, i.e. analytical formulation, experimentation and numerical simulation. The main objective is to demonstrate concepts in a stimulating way and to provide effective teaching tools for students, improving their way of establishing connections between theory and practice; enhancing, thus, their physical sense of reality. Some innovative teaching strategies used in this course were already reported in previous papers (Gameiro da Silva (2007); Gameiro da Silva (2008); Gameiro da Silva and Mateus (2008); Gameiro da Silva (2009))