Each year the Sustainability Team support student learning by providing guest lectures, giving campus tours and supporting projects. Many of the projects supported came from the Greenhouse and Sustainability Program, which connects RMIT students with industry to implement sustainability projects. It aims to provide students from across the University with meaningful opportunities to apply their learning to real-world sustainability challenges.
Projects previously supported by the Sustainability Team include:
Climate Resilience Projects
Students from Masters of Environmental Science & Technology were asked to explore the relationship between extreme climate change events and student health, safety & wellbeing. The RMIT Climate Change Adaptation plan identified an opportunity to better understand the impacts of severe climate change events on the RMIT student population. The project made recommendations on how RMIT could assist students in becoming more resilient. Key focus areas included transport options, student accommodation, on-campus comfort, support available to students and education programs.
Final year engineering students undertake a Capstone Project with industry that provides an authentic, challenging, yet achievable problem-solving engineering experience. All engineering Capstone Projects are presented at EnGenius, a major industry showcase held in October. students from Civil engineering were engaged on a Project with the Sustainability Team to assess campus vulnerability to serve weather and climate change and make suggestions for new specification in the Design Standards for landscaping features that would help shape more resilient campuses. the Design Standards is a set of specifications that set out the minimum requirements for the Design and construction of All RMIT facilities, with the students proposing elements such as green facades and water sensitive urban Design solutions.
Green Travel Planning
Students from the Master of Business Information Technology undertook a Green Travel Plan Project, which aimed to inform the way staff, students and visitors travel to and from the Bundoora Campus at RMIT. The project had a broad scope which studied various issues around the subject of staff and student travel, including policy context, current situation and future projections, existing and future road/transport networks, modes of transport and a communication plan for behaviour change. They were then tasked with recommending a business IT solution that supports green, sustainable travel to campus.
Students from the Computer Science & Software Engineering program built upon the findings of the Business Information Technology student work to design a Sustainable Transport android mobile app. The app used gamification and incentive-based rewards to encourage students and staff of RMIT Bundoora campus to use more sustainable methods of travel to and from the University. In the demonstration version of the app, students and staff could be rewarded for using sustainable methods of travel by receiving points that could be used to obtain prizes or discounts on-campus, with a leader board designed to encourage uptake and competitiveness.