Lesson Plan

Teaching Sequence

Work through this resource material in the following sequence:

10 minutes

Tune In: Green designs for inspiration!

5 minutes

Find Out: Starting the Design Process

40 minutes

Take Action: Create your Designs!

5 minutes

Reflection

Tune In: Green designs for inspiration!

Step 1

Watch the following video with your students to open their minds up to what a sustainable net zero building can look like!

10 Eco-Friendly and Sustainable Houses | Green Building Design - Going Green (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K5IGqQmc-90)

Discuss with your students the elements and features they saw in this clip.

What was something they had never seen before?
What features would they like to see in their own houses?
Can they describe how any of the features work?

Find Out: Starting the Design Process

Preparation

This lesson is a chance for students to put their learning into practice from the previous lessons in this unit.

Your students' task is to design a net zero home or plan how to retrofit their current house to be as energy efficient as possible using their knowledge of energy efficiency, energy conservation and renewable energy technologies gathered throughout this unit. If you haven’t taught the previous lessons in this unit, we recommend you do so for students to have a complete understanding. The previous lessons covered energy efficiency, appliance efficiency, building efficiency and elements of net zero homes. These skills and knowledge would be useful in completing the design task in this lesson.

Step 1

Provide your students with the following brief for their design task:

Design Your Own Net Zero Home!

In previous lessons, you have been learning about energy efficiency, the conservation of energy, and the principles of net-zero homes. Now, it's time to apply that knowledge and get creative! Your task is to design a net-zero home or retrofit (renovate) your existing home to make it as energy-efficient and environmentally friendly as possible.

Objective:

Design a sustainable and energy-efficient home that aims to achieve net-zero energy consumption. A net-zero home is one that produces as much energy as it consumes, effectively reducing its impact on the environment.

Choose Your Approach:

Option 1: Design a New Net Zero Home.

Imagine you're starting from scratch with a piece of land. Design a brand-new home that incorporates the latest technologies and sustainable features to achieve net-zero status.

Option 2: Retrofit Your Existing Home

If you prefer a real-world approach, work with your own house. Identify areas where you can make energy-efficient improvements to move closer to a net-zero status.

Key Considerations:

Orientation of your home (Where does your home face?) -
- Where does the sunlight come in? Remember, having living areas and windows that face North is a great idea as these catch a lot of rays!
- You might like to look at this Understanding Orientation resource to help you

Building Materials
- What materials increase efficiency and are eco-friendly?
- This Building Materials resource can help you

Energy Efficiency
- Consider how to make your home as energy-efficient as possible. Think about heating and cooling, lighting, appliances, and insulation.
- This Energy resource can help you

Renewable Energy Sources
- Explore the use of solar panels, wind turbines, or other renewable energy sources to generate power for your home.
- This Energy resource can help you

Energy Storage
- If you opt for renewable energy, include a system for storing excess energy, such as batteries.
- This Battery Storage resource can help you

Innovation
- Be creative! Investigate emerging technologies and innovative solutions to make your design stand out.

Design:

Create a detailed design of your net-zero home or retrofit.

If you can, include floor plans. If your house has even been for sale, you might be able to find floor plans on the internet, or you could make one up! You must include a written explanation of the features and technologies you've chosen and explain how each aspect of your design contributes to reducing energy consumption and environmental impact by explaining the energy efficiency processes and what impact this has on reducing emissions.

Presentation:

Prepare a presentation where you'll showcase your design to the class. Use visual aids, diagrams, and any tools that help convey your ideas effectively. Explain your design choices and why they make your home or retrofit net zero.

Differentiation

For students requiring extension:

Students could also include the following in the design/presentation

Water Efficiency: Think about how to reduce water consumption
Technological Advancements: Research emerging technologies that can contribute to net-zero homes, such as smart home systems or advanced insulation materials.
Sustainability Beyond Energy: Consider other sustainability aspects like waste reduction, water conservation, and even incorporating green spaces.
Net Zero Communities: Explore the concept of net-zero communities where multiple homes work together to achieve a collective net-zero status

For students requiring extra support:

Josh’s House is a sustainable housing project created by Josh Byrne. Through this, he has profiled several highly sustainable houses in Australia through video. Students requiring extra support could conduct a case study on one of these houses. Noting the features it includes and why these features contribute to it being a net zero home (or close to it!) and how these features enhance energy efficiency and usage!

Take Action: Create your designs!

Step 1

This task can be used as a formative assessment or an engaging activity, to sum up students' learning over the last few lessons in this energy unit. There is also an option to use this as an assessment opportunity. A rubric has been included if you wish to use this task as a formal assessment.

There is much to consider when designing a home - especially to be net zero. Students shouldn’t feel like they need to be experts; some concepts will be tricky to understand completely. The main idea is that they have an understanding of how their knowledge of energy efficiency and renewable energy can be used in a real-world application in an area that is extremely important in the future, both in terms of environmental sustainability and economic sustainability!

Students can be encouraged to be as creative as they wish - you may like to include a budget constraint. However, for students to think about the best practices and use as much innovation as possible, we recommend that they focus on incorporating exciting features regardless of cost first. As an extension opportunity, you may like to get students to analyse the cost and benefits of a project such as this.

This task can also be undertaken as a group project. Depending on how much time you have to allocate to this task, it could be shortened so that each student focuses on a different aspect of the design and features included. This lesson would benefit from being run over multiple classes or having some work set as homework.

Some more great resources to direct your students to:

Josh’s House, a project created by Josh Byrne where he undertook the design and construction of his own 10-star energy-efficient home and has documented the process for others with lots of great information and videos!	Josh’s House Sustainable Housing Project PDF Plans An example of what a great sustainable design can look like. This plan includes diagrams, floor plans and explanations of features, as well as sun and air movement. Some of this will be a bit advanced for your students, but it can provide inspiration on what they should be trying to create! Josh’s House Interactive Tour of the sustainability features from the outside of Josh’s House. Josh’s House factsheets Josh’s House has also put together some factsheets about different aspects of sustainable housing, such as solar energy initiatives, wall types and insulation, windows and glazing and window furnishings.
Your Home website from the Australian Government, a guide to environmentally sustainable homes.	YourHome.gov.au Lots of fantastic information on everything from passive design to materials to energy, as well as case studies
Million Jobs Plan from Beyond Zero Emissions.	Million Jobs Plan Chapter 2 - Better Buildings outlines opportunities for the future and how greenhouse gas emissions can be minimised by retrofitting and designing better buildings.
Sustainability Victoria - Zero Net Carbon Homes	Zero Net Carbon Homes Provides information on efficient building design.

Step 2

Invite your students to present their designs to the rest of the class, focusing on what they designed and why.

Get students to give each presenter:

A positive aspect
A question
A similarity
A difference
A suggested improvement.

You might like to display your students' designs around the classroom to continue to inspire them!

If you have students who are interested in this area, you might like to direct them to the Year 13 website. Year 13 is an organisation that specialises in career education for young people. They aim to improve the well-being of young Australians by improving the school-to-work transition through education and information! They have great resources about the tech industry if you think you might have any budding climate solutions or tech entrepreneurs!

Reflection

Invite your students to reflect on this lesson and past lessons by using the Projecting Across Time Visible Thinking Routine

What did you already know about this topic?
Reach back in time - What was our understanding of building homes 50-100 years ago?
Reach forward in time - How do you think our understanding of building a home and interacting with our environment will change in 20 years' time?
How has your thinking about this topic changed?
What can you do now and in the future to make a more sustainable world a reality?

Design a Net Zero Home Using Scientific Knowledge

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Summary

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