Aims, Process and Results of a Virtual Experiment for a Didactic Tool Based on Two Hunan Heritage Buildings

In didactic activities for conservation, for example, diagnosis on-site, the fragilities of historical buildings are affected a lot. Their structural fragilities not only threaten students’ safety but also cannot afford overloaded visits. They are scarce teaching materials, and the diagnosis could be too costly in different kinds of resources to repeat. All these reasons have validated the application of virtual experiments in this field, primarily when online education was conducted more often and widely during the COVID-19 pandemic. This essay introduces the process and results of the Virtual Experiment on Decay Survey of Historical Buildings: Diagnosis of Damp Issues developed by Hunan University, based on two cases of Hunan heritage buildings from earlier cooperation with Politecnico di Milano. The transformation of didactic outcomes from offline to online is crucial; if we apply this didactic mode to respond to the fragilities of heritage in education, the aims, process and results are presented here with this case study.