Students design grass-walled portable classroom

Posted: 5:21 pm Fri, March 26, 2010
By Associated Press

HAGERSTOWN — Pre-engineering students at Washington County Technical High School have designed an energy-independent portable classroom that, among other green features, would have a wall of grass.

The plans, which call for the portable classrooms to have photovoltaic solar panels and geothermal heating, were presented by seniors Keagan Boyce, Cody Case and Deanna Molnar during a March 17 ceremony at the school.

Some of the features suggested in the designs include a light shelf, curtain walls, prismatic skylights, floors made of cork or recyclable carpeting, denim insulation made from recycled jeans, fiber cement exterior walls and fiber cement boarding.

The exterior would feature a wall covered with grass designed to provide natural insulation and to prevent water runoff from the roof. Rain gardens would be created at the downspouts.

Grass on the roof over the vestibule would be used for aesthetic purposes and to collect runoff, said Molnar, 18.

The ideas came from research and a field trip to the Ecobuild Conference in Washington, D.C., an annual conference on sustainable building.

The plans earned a $10,000 grant from State Farm Insurance, in partnership with SkillsUSA. The first-time grant, which was awarded at the March 17 ceremony, was one of 12 awarded for sustainability projects in school systems across the nation.

The grant money will be used to purchase photovoltaic solar panels and an inverter, and to help pay for the students’ trip to the SkillsUSA conference in Kansas City, Mo., said Alan Zube, a pre-engineering teacher at the school.

Zube said in an e-mail that he thinks the green portable classroom designed at the school could be built for less than the amount the school system pays for conventional portable classrooms.

A rough estimate of the cost of building the portable classroom is $30,000, Zube said. Whether that would include all of the features envisioned by the students would depend on how much is donated and how much could be purchased at a reduced cost, he said.

“We think this is the first school in the nation for students to design and students to construct classroom portables with photovoltaic solar panels and geothermal heating,” Washington County Administrator Gregory Murray said during the ceremony, at which State Farm agent Gaye McGovern presented the grant check to Tech High Principal Jeffrey E. Stouffer and Zube.

The design by the pre-engineering students would be undertaken by Tech High’s carpentry, electrical, HVAC and horticulture students.

Case, 17, said the portable classroom design should not require any electricity, except for computers, which would be powered by the solar panels. An inverter would give readings from the solar panels, providing information on whether they were using energy or giving back energy, he said.

“The solar panels make it self-sustaining,” said Case, who plans to study mining engineering at West Virginia University.

Boyce, 18, said one of the goals in the design was to use natural light instead of artificial light for the classroom.

He said there is a bigger goal in mind.

“We hope this is a catalyst for building more green buildings. We hope this will start a green movement not just in this county, but across the country,” said Boyce, who has been accepted to Penn State, where he plans to study engineering.

In addition to being energy-independent, the classroom design calls for alternative materials that would not release toxic fumes, such as cork flooring or recyclable carpeting.

Molnar, who plans to study architecture at Carnegie Mellon University or the University of Pittsburgh, said the idea for the exterior grass wall came from the Ecobuild Conference.

The grant is tied to the Sustainable Design Competition at the national SkillsUSA conference in Kansas City in June, Zube said. The Tech High team will compete against the other 11 State Farm regional winners.

Tech High’s project was chosen from the region that includes Delaware, Maryland, North Carolina, Virginia, Washington, D.C., and West Virginia, McGovern said.

State Farm team manager Greg Gaspar from Frederick, one of the judges for the grant, said the Tech High submission was the only one from Maryland. He said it was well-planned and stood out from the others in the region.

Other green projects under development at Tech High include a wind turbine, which after a year-and-a-half process has received the required building permit. Zube said he hopes it will be up and generating energy before the end of this school year.

A group of pre-engineering students is working on a design for an energy-efficient, color-changing roof, using a Lemelson-MIT InvenTeam grant. Those students will present the final design at EurekaFest at MIT in Boston in June and might incorporate the idea in the construction of the prototype for the sustainable portable classroom.

“To change the energy picture in this country, you have to start with these guys,” Zube said of his students. “They’re the ones that can make a change.”