At 6 p.m. Tuesday anxious students trickled into the Wake Continuing Education Center – Room 23 on East Campus.

Twice a week, professor Patrick Foster teaches the class “Building Green” where students study “green” building practices.

In the class, students learn how to construct buildings out of recycled materials, replant vegetation, and incorporate everything from solar panels to high-efficiency lighting.

A $100,000 two-year grant has allowed contractor and professor Patrick Foster to collaborate with Santa Barbara’s green builder, Joe Campanelli. They have decided to create a new class to educate students on sustainable materials in construction.

“The class structure is a theory class on Tuesday nights with guest speakers and screenings of short segments of the documentary,” said Foster. “We also take fieldtrips on Saturdays to the different places we discuss in class.”

Foster and Campanelli based the class around Brooks Institute Professor Tracy Trotter’s documentary “From the Ground Up,” which aired in the Santa Barbara Film Festival on Jan. 27. The documentary follows the construction of a sustainable house built on Old San Marcos Road. Foster incorporates the documentary into the class by showing and discussing edited clips with his students.

Foster also invites guest speakers to discuss their sustainable living experience.

This is one way that basing the class around a documentary allows Foster to create a multidimensional learning environment.

The class is full of attentive students ranging in age and major, but who all share the common interest of discovering new ways of how to live green. At first, Foster was worried because only 16 people had enrolled in the class before the semester started, but he was relieved when 17 students crashed the course.

“Many local architects and contractors are interested in this class,” Foster said.

Continuing Education student Dan Good said he wanted to learn about environmental building trades because, “building green is much more than building a house with the right materials. It is using recycled materials and saving resources,” he said.

Many of the students are looking forward to the field trips to different work sites.

“You learn a lot more from field trips because you get a hands-on experience,” Good said.

Foster also said he wanted to “teach sustainable building practices to the community primarily architects, engineers, construction workers, and the public because the building industry uses more energy and waste than any sector of society.”

Students listened intently as Foster explained to the class that approximately 40 percent of waste comes from operating buildings, which is not nearly as much as the impact of cars.

“We are running out of energy and water so conservation is important,” Foster said. “It’s not something you can take or leave, it [global warming] is urgently here.”