All six of Ball State’s student teams from the University’s College of Architecture and Planning (CAP) competing in this year’s Solar Decathlon Design and Build Challenges—a  U.S. Department of Energy competition—have advanced to the finals in the categories of New Housing, Retrofit Housing, Attached Housing, and Office Building and Education Building. Five of the six teams are participating in the design challenge portion of the competition, and one team is competing in the build challenge.

Each year, multi-disciplinary teams of students from CAP compete in the Solar Decathlon Design Challenge by designing high-performance, low-carbon, and affordable homes. This year, the project is to plan and design an affordable, net-zero energy duplex home —which will house two families in the Westminster/St. Philip Neri neighborhood on the Near Eastside of Indianapolis. Read more about this project and some of the students working on it in this Ball State blog post.

This Solar Decathlon effort is one of Ball State’s immersive learning projects—high-impact learning experiences that involve collaborative, student-driven teams guided by faculty mentors. Students earn credit for working with community partners such as businesses, nonprofits, and government agencies to address community challenges through the creation of a product that has a lasting impact.

By Ball State University Marketing and Communications