Building a Carbon Smart Community with Legos

What can a team of 6th-graders from Redmond, Washington tell us about climate change, embodied carbon emissions from building construction, and the potential for hard work and innovative thinking to transform an industry?

The six friends formed a team to compete in the First Lego League, a global contest in which students create a project that uses science, math, and technology to solve real-world challenges while building confidence, growing their knowledge, and developing habits of learning. Teams compete for a Global Innovation Award that showcases their innovative solutions.

The Auto Bots — as the friends called their team — focused on how buildings are contributing to global carbon emissions and aimed their attention at solutions to climate change. K.D. Hallman, an environmentalist and former VP at Microsoft, provided them insights into the problems caused by climate change and guidance on different ways to tackle it.

The team decided to focus their project on embodied carbon in building materials and construction because they had learned about the enormous impact that manufacturing and transportation of materials has on the overall carbon footprint of buildings, including even brand new buildings before people have begun to live and work in them.

Rather than limiting themselves only to embodied carbon, the team designed an entire “Carbon Smart Community” designed to be both low in embodied carbon and highly efficient in its use of energy. They built a model of their community with the same limited set of Lego blocks provided to every team so all teams start out with equal resources. Every building in their Carbon Smart Community has solar panels on the roof and by design is made of recyclable materials.

A key goal of the community’s design was to marry beauty and function. The team designed an innovative solution for maintaining “green roofs” on buildings and houses in dry climates where there is less rainfall. The houses collect and recycle rainfall to support living roofs made of grass and other plants that are beautiful while sheltering the occupants of the houses, storing carbon dioxide and breathing out oxygen.

As part of the team’s research at the beginning of the project, they visited the nearby Microsoft campus to understand the enormous quantity of embodied carbon emissions connected with modern construction materials. They learned that for every ton of Portland cement manufactured, the process releases an equivalent ton of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. They also learned about new methods of making concrete that can potentially sequester, or permanently store, carbon dioxide in buildings while creating stronger and more resilient concrete.

Andrew Himes of the Carbon Leadership Forum at the University of Washington advised the team in the development phase of the project and helped guide their research, and Forum founder and director Professor Kate Simonen showed up to review the completed project and cheer the team on at the regional First Lego League competition on December 15 at the Chinook Middle School in Bellevue, Washington.

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Carter Tinsley is a writer, entrepreneur, and productivity coach. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand with his wife, two young kids, and a voracious cat. He’s on Twitter @trainertinsley, and you can…

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