Smart Cities Tiny House Course script

Lesson 1 - Introduction

Welcome and Happy to see you attending this Smart Cities and Tiny House course. Our goal is to build most of the components of a Tiny House and to show you how each element makes your Tiny House more Sustainable.

We will show you why a Tiny house is much more sustainable than a larger house. Rather than just talking about all these concepts we though it would be better to get hands dirty and actually build an example of a Tiny house. Perhaps a Tiny house 3 metres by 3 metres in floor space.

Everything in this course has been carefully designed to be buildable and practical. Yes - at the end of this course you will probably have all the knowledge and skills to build your own Tiny house with all the comforts of a modern house.

Some of the key components in the Tiny house will be a:

• A low-cost computer built using electronic waste
• Solar PV system with battery
• Insulation that goes into the tiny house and sealing up the house to make it air tight
• An air heat exchanger for the tiny house so you can get fresh air but not waste energy to the outer environment
• We will build a Smart rainwater tank to meet our water needs and also protect waterways
• A composting toilet so that we can collect and reuse nutrients in the garden
• Showcasing low energy appliances such as an e-bike as a form of sustainable transport and a portable refrigerator.
• Information sharing platforms (without adds and

All these components are easy to build and hopefully your school or local businesses will help you to buy or donate the things you need for your projects.

And if you can't build the different components don't worry. We will be using sensors to collect data from every project that we do so that you can access the data on the internet.

The whole course is available as a series of educational videos. In each lesson we will take you through the following learning stages.

• What is the question we are going to answer
• The environmental issue we are trying to solve
• Basic theory on the current subject
• Then we enter the build phase (the fun part)
• Often our projects will require a sensor (for example - a temperature sensor if we are testing the properties of insulation)
• Our low-cost computer will be used to collect and analyse the sensor data
• Testing our new innovation under real world conditions to see if it really does work.

Don't worry if you have never coded a computer or even built something before. All the videos assume no prior knowledge and break big tasks into small and simple steps.

We will also create some additional lessons for some projects that are nice to know about, but not essential to the course program.

If you have any ideas please let us know. We would be happy to include them so that others can learn from your experience.

We have been working with low cost computers, sensors to educate young people about sustainability for about 10 years. There is no time to lose in changing our habits. The Earth has a limited carbon budget that is rapidly running out.

This course is offered for free and the course content will also be available to anyone via downloads and on a mediawiki site similar to Wikipedia. All information will be available as Creative Commons licenses which allows anyone to copy the content and distribute it for free.

Once your finish this course at school the best thing you can do is to build something similar and even take some of the learning home. I'm sure after finishing this course you will be able to see lots of opportunities to improve the sustainability of your own home. That will make the entire team here happy.

So that's it for this video. I hope to see you soon as we take our first big steps towards building a Tiny house.

Lesson 2 - Why a Tiny House ?

In this video we are going to talk about Tiny Houses. Why do we need them and what shapes and sizes they come in.

Most of us live in a regular house. But the size and the sustainability of houses varies a lot between different countries.

In Australia we have some of the largest houses in the world. Not only are the houses large but each house has one or two cars, a road out the front, pipes underground to deliver water, gas, even electricity and the internet, and to take away wastes from our toilets, showers and sinks.

When built a typical house has already released 90 tonnes of carbon dioxide. The carbon dioxide comes from the steel, concrete and other material that go into building the house.

Spare a thought for the animals and plants that once lived on the site before the house was built. They all had to find other places to live. We made them homeless, so to speak.

In modern cities houses sprawl as far as the eye can see. Black roofs and black bitumen make our cities hotter in the summer. Those same hard surfaces cause rainwater to rush into stormwater pipes and empty into rivers and streams. Imagine being a platypus or fish. When it rains house house floods and litter and garbage contaminate your once clean environment.

Before Europeans arrived in Australia houses were more modest.

Houses were built using local materials such as stone, wood and even the hides from animals. They were small and used mainly for cooking and sleeping. Some tiny houses were also used to store grain. They didn't have as many material things and of course there were no cars.

The overall impact on the enviornment was minimal and hence very sustainable.