New Perspectives in Science Education

This contribution presents the results obtained within the KA2 Erasmus Plus project CO2 Monitoring in Schools for digital and green competences (CHANGE) [1]. The consortium, made up of an Italian Research Institute and four VET schools in Bulgaria, Italy, Romania and Spain, is developing, testing and optimizing a didactic pathway centered on Indoor Air Quality [2] in schools. The pathway combines digital skills, i.e. system integration, programming and data processing, with socially relevant topics such as IAQ monitoring, energy efficiency, greenhouse gases and climate change, raw materials and open data, in order to provide students with competences useful to meet the requirements of the labour market and to foster their critical thinking on scientific basis. The experimental section consists in the assembly of CO2 monitoring stations controlled by a Raspberry PI microcomputer with open source code programmed in Python, and in its use for the continuous monitoring of the CO2 concentration in the classroom. The acquired data, as well as the metadata needed for their interpretation, are collected in an open data repository [3] based on CKAN [4]. Mid-term monitoring (approx. 1 month) has been carried out in different indoor spaces and the results, analyzed by the students themselves, will be presented. The outcomes of the first project year (2022-23), testified by questionnaires and CO2 monitoring reports, show a general satisfaction towards the pathway and the Erasmus Plus dissemination activities. As a drawback, the metadata annotation, needed to obtain reliable and reusable monitoring data, shows some weaknesses. The mitigation solutions that are going to be tested within the second year (2023-24) of the project include teachers’ training on open data management, software interface simplification, and increase of the detail in the annotation and reporting guidelines provided to the students. This presentation will eventually discuss their effectiveness and ease of implementation. Indeed, the ultimate goal is the establishment of a reliable action chain connecting monitoring with open data in order to enhance further elaboration and citizen science initiatives involving schools.

Keywords: Indoor air quality, digital, sensors, open source, data

References

[1] https://www.co2lab.it/change-erasmus/

[2] S. Sadrizadeh et al., Journal of Building Engineering 57, (2022) 104908

[3] https://dalia-bo.cnr.it/organization/change.

[4] https://ckan.org/