‘Safe Shelters’ At Newtown Middle School

By Martha Coville

Seventh graders in Don Ramsey’s technology education class have learned what it takes to design and construct a shelter. On December 11, his 16 students turned in the architectural models they had built for an assignment designed to teach them about the many variables architects, builders, and contractors work around.

Mr Ramsey challenged his Newtown Middle School students to work as architects, designing a building and creating the same kind of model professional architects use to pitch their designs to clients. He gave his students the freedom to design any kind of shelter or building they wanted, and most decided to build models of homes. One student, Emily Anderson, explained that the students “all built houses that were eco-friendly and had safety features.”

Students accomplished this in a number of ways. Several designed houses built of recycled materials, others built models featuring closed-looped ecological systems, and one student designed a house insulated by its own landscaping.

Emily designed a house constructed from repurposed tractor trailers and train boxes, represented by cardboard boxes. The model also included solar panels and large windows, to provide the house with solar-derived heating.

Ryan Branecky called his model “The Dome.” It represented a building constructed to look like one half of a sphere. He explained he had chosen the shape to create a structurally strong building.

Although Ryan envisioned “The Dome” as being built from recycled materials, he had painstakingly assembled the model from dowels that measured one-eighth of an inch and tissue paper.

Geometry figured into the project, too. Ryan used the doweling to build equilateral triangles, which he covered with tissue paper. Then, he joined two triangles to form a diamond shape. Three diamonds combined to form a pentagon, and one more triangle, tacked onto the pentagon’s edge, made a hexagon. Ryan explained that by alternating pentagons with hexagons, he was able to create a perfect half-sphere.

Victoria Hanulik and Grace Williams worked together to create a model of a two story “eco-friendly suburban house.” Their design incorporated many elements of a closed loop ecological system, in which a structure reuses waste products and emissions.

For example, Victoria and Grace envisioned a house relying primarily on solar power, with fossil fuels used as a secondary heating source. Solar energy would be efficiently collected from panels facing south.

The fossil fuels would, of course, produce carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas. But ample vegetation would convert the carbon dioxide into oxygen for its occupants to breathe. Their model also included specially designed gutters to channel rainwater into the well.

Leah Brinkney built a model of an earth-sheltered home, which she described as extremely safe and environmentally friendly. She explained that building a shelter into the side of a hill would protect it from earthquakes and firestorms. And the pioneers who lived in sod houses were evidently onto something. Leah said that dirt actually makes a wonderful insulator. A building surrounded by earth remains between 50 and 60 degrees Fahrenheit all year long, and would need very little fuel to heat or cool it.

Leah’s model represented a house built of concrete, also a good insulator, and a particularly cheap construction material. Concrete is also strong, so Leah built a yard on top of the model’s roof, since the hills surrounding the house were too steep to be landscaped.