• primary school classrooms
• acoustic quality
• auralization
• virtual reality
• rtSOFE

This thesis is articulated in two parts. The first part concerns the project of ideas of a primary school in Finland. The latter focuses on one classroom and defines which is the best sound-absorbing panels’ configuration for satisfying acoustic requirements.
As the idea of school is constantly developing, buildings’ design should properly answer to actual requirements. For this reason, the competition of ideas ‘Learn Better, Rephasing education through architecture’ (2019) has asked to elaborate an innovative project of a primary school in Tahvonlahti, a south-eastern neighbourhood of Helsinki.
An in-depth study has been done on acoustic requirements in classrooms. Children spend most of their time in classrooms subject to high noise levels. The purpose of this work is to design five different configurations of the above-mentioned primary school classroom. They are thought for a capacity of a maximum of thirty pupils, changing the position and the dimensions of sound-reflecting and sound-absorbing panels inside the room. In order to evaluate a suitable solution for the classroom, reverberation time and other indices of acoustic quality have been computed. Reverberation times and Clarity 50 show better results for the so-called ‘classroom better 3’. Moreover, a demo has been set up for simulating classrooms in an audio-visual virtual environment. Thus, participants, which take part in the demo, may experience a pupil’s point of view in the classrooms and the listening effort in word recognition in background noise.