Winners of the 2026 pepperMINT Competition Have Been Announced

Working in groups of three and four, the students at Scheffel Gymnasium in Lahr, together with their teacher Christian Oelze, developed various projects on the topic of energy-efficient homes as part of their Science and Technology (NwT) class. In addition to the students’ creativity, pepperMINT strategy planner Miriam Bartels particularly highlighted the fact that there were a large number of girls among the 17 participants. “And so the groups that took first through third place ultimately consisted of eight girls and two boys,” Miriam Bartels said happily.

To begin with, the pepperMINT strategy planner gave all participants a brief introduction to Hochschule Offenburg. This was followed by presentations of the individual projects, featuring a large, self-built wooden house and posters designed for the projects. The first group had devised a smart home staircase whose step lighting turned on only after a combination of signals from ultrasonic and brightness sensors—programmed using the Arduino physical computing platform—was triggered, thereby saving energy. The second group presented a light guide that captured sunlight using a parabolic mirror on the roof and transmitted it via fiber-optic cables to dark rooms, thereby reducing the need for artificial lighting—and thus energy consumption—in those spaces. The third group aimed to minimize heat—and thus energy—loss through windows using smart blinds that close depending on the temperature difference between the outside and inside as well as the brightness. The fourth group built their house of the future using building blocks made from recycled plastic and moss walls that improve outdoor air quality. And the fifth group increased heating energy efficiency: Copper pipes were attached to exterior walls made of basalt scraps and concrete, which heat up significantly. Water inside the pipes was heated by the walls’ heat and transported via a heat pump to the underfloor heating system or, for later use, to a cost-effective and easy-to-implement sand storage system.   

After lunch in the university cafeteria and a soldering project in the Maker Space at Hochschule Offenburg, the participants were allowed to vote on which group had best implemented and presented its project. The top three groups received awards. The prizes included Europa-Park gift certificates of varying values depending on the ranking, as well as University hoodies (1st place) and University coffee mugs (2nd and 3rd place). The “Active Warm Wall” project took first place, ahead of the “House of the Future” and the “Light Conductor.”