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 then relate each component to a concept in Sustainability.

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 is this course has been carefully designed to be buildable and practical. Yes - at the end of this course you will probably be able 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
• 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.