A course on Climate Change and Sustainable Building Design

TL;DR

This paper introduces an intermediate course on sustainable physics focusing on climate change and building design, integrating lectures and student projects to explore mitigation and adaptation strategies.

Contribution

It presents a novel interdisciplinary course combining climate change and sustainable building physics with practical student projects.

Findings

Students develop understanding of climate change and building physics concepts.

Hands-on projects enhance practical skills in modeling and experiments.

The course fosters interdisciplinary thinking and applied learning.

Abstract

We present an intermediate-level course on sustainable physics, which combines lectures and student projects. Sustainable physics concepts are progressively introduced through both a global and a specialized perspective: climate change and building design. The lectures and hands-on activities on both topics show how they share common concepts and provide complementary points of view. Climate change mitigation and adaptation are touched on via student group projects, where they are asked to tackle a specific question of their choosing via reviews of the literature, modeling or experiments.