Summative Heat Transfer Project - Designing a House

Project-and problem-based learning have been shown to enhance learning and to provide other benefits such as improving soft skills including teamwork and communication.They can be especially effective for engineering students to demonstrate how theory is applied to real world problems.While comprehensive projects are an essential element in capstone courses, they are not used as often in traditional more theory-based courses such as heat transfer.This paper describes an example of a summative and ill-structured project to design a house which incorporates all three major heat transfer mechanisms of conduction, convection, and radiation.Project details, selected results, recommended modifications, and options for alternative implementations are provided.