On October 16, 2007, the students enrolled in honors courses traveled to Washington DC to visit and tour the energy-efficient homes built for the international Solar Decathlon competition. Now the competition is over, and the houses have been broken apart and shipped back to their home institutions. If you missed the opportunity to see the solar-powered homes, no need to fear - the students in ENGL 030S and EARTH 100H/STS 200H have created a virtual tour of the competition!
Viewable in Google Earth, each honors scholar was assigned the task of visiting 1-2 Solar Decathlon homes. The ENGL 030S students wrote an overall summary about each home, and the EARTH 100H/STS 200H created an online audio and photo tour of each house that includes interviews with builders of the homes.
The Solar Decathlon virtual tour is complete! You can read the house descriptions and see the audio/image files by clicking on this link that will open in Google Earth.
Note that to utilize the Google Earth module, you will need to download Google Earth, a free program, onto your computer.