Ekotrope Partners with AZ High School
Educating students on environmental science has been a growing trend, but as energy efficiency continues to experience an innovative industry overhaul, more schools are beginning to see the benefits in educating the next generation of HERS raters. Ekotrope recently partnered with Desert Edge High School in Goodyear, Arizona, Daran Wastchak of Learning Edge, LLC, and Arizona Public Service (the largest electric utility in Arizona) to offer a course on building science, energy efficiency and home energy ratings.
The course will include a capstone class that teaches the students how to use Ekotrope’s software tools to make all they have learned come together when they build their own digital models of homes. Ekotrope will allow them to explore the impact of both poor and good energy efficiency design and deepen their understanding of good building practices. “We’re very excited to have Ekotrope as a partner in this course,” said Wastchak. “Without the energy modeling class, the students wouldn’t have as full and meaningful of an experience. Ekotrope’s user friendly, cloud-based software is intuitive for the students to use because it’s so similar to the gaming tools they use everyday outside of the classroom. We have every hope that this course, and the Ekotrope class in particular, will empower students to have successful careers in STEM.” Ekotrope believes that opening student’s eyes to building science, HERS ratings, and the Ekotrope HERS rating software will also push more than a few students to join the HERS industry as home energy raters some day. “We’re proud to be sponsoring the class and providing the next generation of HERS raters with access to our software so that they can continue to push the energy efficiency industry forward” says Ziv Rozenblum, CEO of Ekotrope. “Moreover, we challenged the students in this class to design creatively and rate efficiently by asking each student to compete in the first Ekotrope Design & Model Competition.”
Judged by their teachers and our engineers, the student with the most innovative building design paired with the lowest HERS score will win a bundle of Ekotrope merchandise and an Amazon gift card. We can’t wait to see what they come up with.
Interested in partnering with Ekotrope at your school? Email info@ekotrope.com for more information.