Students investigate how heat transfer affects public spaces and use the engineering design process to create a passive cooling solution for a community seating area. They apply temperature data, material testing, and scale-model design to build a structure that reduces surface heat while staying welcoming and usable for people. Through feedback from a city parks and recreation staff member, a landscape architect, peers, and family audiences, students revise their ideas and defend their final design with evidence.

Students will apply scientific principles of thermal energy transfer to plan, build, test, and revise a scale passive cooling structure that reduces surface temperature while keeping a seating area usable and welcoming. They will investigate how shade, airflow, surface texture, and sustainable materials affect heat absorption and cooling, using temperature measurements and model data to improve their designs. Students will generate and compare possible solutions, seek and use feedback from a city parks and recreation staff member, a landscape architect, and peers, and document revisions in design logs. They will communicate and defend their final design with evidence from prototype tests, material choices, and usability considerations during a public design review and showcase.

Students will create a sequence of products: a campus heat map from the launch investigation, annotated sketches and scale plans, weekly prototype versions, temperature-data tables and graphs, and design log entries documenting each test-and-revise cycle. Midway through, teams will produce a gallery-walk display with their current model, cooling evidence, and revision notes based on sticky-note feedback about shade, airflow, and usability. The final product is a revised 1:10 passive cooling model of the seating area that uses sustainable materials, lowers surface temperature by at least 5°C, and includes features that keep the space welcoming and usable. Teams will also create a short design review presentation for the city parks and recreation staff member and landscape architect, then present the model again at the Cool Court Showcase with a live temperature-drop demonstration for families and classmates.

Start with a Heat Island Hunt around campus: teams use infrared thermometers to measure and map the hottest and coolest surfaces, comparing asphalt, concrete, grass, shaded benches, and building edges. Back in class, students analyze the temperature patterns, discuss why some spaces feel more welcoming than others, and connect their findings to the question of how to cool a community seating area without electricity. Then reveal the design challenge with photos or a simple model of the community center seating space, and have students do a quick sketch-and-share of one passive cooling idea they want to test.

Host a “Cool Court Showcase” where teams present their revised scale models to the city parks and recreation staff member, a landscape architect, families, and classmates. Each team gives a brief design review explaining how their structure uses shade, airflow, and sustainable materials, then demonstrates its impact with a live temperature-drop test and shares design log evidence from revisions. Guests use a simple feedback ballot to vote on the most welcoming and usable design while community partners ask questions and offer final comments. Display heat-mapping visuals, prototype iterations, and data tables around the room so visitors can see how each team tested, revised, and defended its solution.