Assignments
We will be working with straw bale construction. The goal is for everyone to become more familiar with the key components of a straw bale wall system. But before we dive into building, we need to take a step back and educate ourselves about why straw bale is worth learning about. In groups of 2, give a 5 minute presentation on the most important characteristic of straw bale construction. You will be judged on how convincing your argument is that the characteristic you choose is in the MOST important characteristic.
In order to better understand how a home can fulfill a need, we need to better how a home works. By using something called Building Science, we can evaluate how a home operates without being able to see directly behind the walls. The objective of the energy audit is to get a better understanding of the tools available for evaluating a home.
Students will prepare an individual research abstract and team poster that summarizes their engineering field research including 1) Hypothesis 2) Methods 3) Results 4) Conclusions
An energy audit shows us the existing conditions of a home, but how can we predict the effect of making any changes to the design. For example, if you have $1000 to spend on my home in order to make it use less energy, how do you know if you should replace the windows, add insulation, or buy a new furnace? The objective of this activity is to give you the tools to predict the effect of those changes through computer energy modeling. Using BeOpt, model your family’s home. Create a report that shows how much energy (electricity, propane, or natural gas) that your family uses each year.
To understand the tradeoffs between design decisions and project cost. Why do we care about cost? What are some of the factors that you think might influence the cost of your design?
Novice blueprint readers look at the entire page of words, lines and weird symbols and get overwhelmed. It's easy at that point for your brain to shut down and you just say, "I can't read blueprints." If you tried to read an entire page of words at the same time, you couldn't do that either. You simply have to start at one corner and figure out what you can learn from the blueprint. The main difference between a blueprint and a page of text is that you know to start at the top left corner on a page of text, then to left to right till the bottom of the page. Blueprints don't always have a place you need to start. The objective of this assignment is to help us become comfortable with engineering drawings so that we can figure out where to start. The most basic concept about reading blueprints, and the one to keep in mind no matter how good you get at reading blueprints, is "Plan, Elevation and Section". Your first thought when looking a drawing should be, "Is this a Plan, an Elevation or a Section?" First, some quick definitions: Plan: a view looking downward on the object, usually the horizontal plane cut at 30" above the floor. Elevation: a view looking sideways at the object, usually from the north, the west, the south or the east. Section: a cut-through view of the object, usually an imaginary view that shows how something will be built.