Year 11 Intermediate VCAL students recently completed a unit of study on sustainable building design. Many VCAL students are undertaking a VET Building and Construction course and this study had a great deal of industry relevance. For other VCAL students it provided them with an insight into what makes an energy efficient house.
Students firstly undertook an audit of their own homes and researched what cutting-edge building products are available while gaining a greater understanding of how a house can have a reduced environmental footprint. Further research looked at local and international sustainable building features, then students armed with this knowledge began designing an environmentally sustainable house.
Year 11 Silver student Isaiah Villani writes about the task:
Mr Ashley Savage from the College’s IT department presented two computer-aided design (CAD) programs — Sketchup and Minecraft. He took us through all the steps in order to create a plan for our sustainable house which was helpful because most of us hadn’t used Sketchup or Minecraft before. Sketchup was hard to use at first because it was a newly-implemented program. My group decided to use Minecraft instead, which enabled us to work at a faster pace and complete the online version with extra time to work on our physical model.
In groups we firstly designed, cut, glued, measured and constructed a model cardboard house which gave us a rough idea of what we really wanted to do, and in doing so we also gained better ideas for the final model.
We had to create the actual model of the house using sustainable materials and were given three weeks to do so. The class was split up into groups and we worked collectively to create the house. My group completed the house at a level that was above our expectations. It was fun and enjoyable.
Finally, we presented our CAD designs and models to the class. This was easy to do because we motivated each other and ourselves, while also having a few practice runs helped quite a bit.
