Teaching for Sustainable Construction: Adapting the Design, Assemble and Dismantle (Dad) Project Across Global Engineering Education Contexts

Project based learning (PBL) has become an important approach in engineering education for promoting authentic engagement with design, construction, and professional practice. Increasingly, such approaches are also expected to support sustainability related competencies through resource awareness and context responsive learning. This paper presents the Design, Assemble and Dismantle (DAD) Project as a specialised implementation of PBL developed to support experiential construction education across diverse educational contexts. Findings indicate that DAD remains pedagogically coherent across varied institutional structures, accreditation requirements, and cohort characteristics. Through full scale assembly and dismantling activities, students develop teamwork, communication, constructability awareness, critical thinking, and the ability to translate design decisions into practical implementation. Sustainability within the project is considered primarily through environmental and educational perspectives. Environmental sustainability is represented through efficient use of structural members, reuse enabled through dismantling, and awareness of construction efficiency and waste reduction, while educational sustainability is reflected in the transferability of pedagogical practice across institutions. The findings suggest that DAD provides a scalable and adaptable framework for experiential engineering education that supports international collaboration and contributes to the development of more sustainability-oriented construction curricula.