One of the units I teach to year 8 students is a sustainable house design project, where the students are required to use Google SketchUp to design a sustainable house. More on SketchUp in my next post.
Prior to beginning work on the house however, I spend some time identifying sustainable design options with my students. Along with some great resources found by a fellow staff member (JT), I came accross this online resource made by the Queensland Government; Designing for Sustainable Living.
The learning object focuses on the design of a family home and incorporates a number of options and decisions that can be made. A final sustainablity report describes the impact of the decisions made and allocates a points value to each. Students finish with a final score (out of 300 I think..!)
There is quite a bit of written content embedded in the learning object and in the past I have prepared a worksheet for students to complete, however this year, I had students participate in an onine discussion (as described in the wikispaces post) which worked well and allowed students to access a record of their thoughts and actions which could be applied to their own house design later on.
Some issues that I faced included;
* It is a bit confusing to save your work and after creating a user, you need to use the same computer in order to retreive your work.
* It is possible to flick through the avaialble options and choose the one with the most points.
* Navigation is a bit confusing, especially at the start. You need to click "Siting" to return to the list of options to follow.
Some positive aspects I discovered were;
* The embedded content is very useful and can be printed out and used as notes for revision / application to students own project.
* The graphics are quite good and the layont works well.
* The range of sustainable options is very high and the module exposes students to a wide range of products and features.
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