The document describes a project called Green Awareness in Action (GAIA) that aims to raise awareness about energy efficiency in European schools. It uses an educational IoT lab kit and gamification to teach students and educators about energy consumption monitoring and behavioral changes to reduce energy use. Sensors are installed in 15 schools across 3 countries to collect energy and environmental data. Students access this data through digital apps and can earn points in an online game for completing activities that analyze consumption and test behavioral changes to improve efficiency. The goal is to educate youth on sustainable habits and empower them to influence energy decisions in their families and communities.

1. USING AN EDUCATIONAL IOT LAB KIT
AND GAMIFICATION FOR ENERGY
AWARENESS IN EUROPEAN SCHOOLS
Georgios Mylonas, Dimitrios Amaxilatis, Lidia Pocero, Iraklis Markelis,
Computer Technology Institute & Press “Diophantus”, Patras, Greece
Joerg Hofstaetter, OVOS, Vienna, Austria
Pavlos Koulouris, Ellinogermaniki Agogi, Athens, Greece

2. GREEN AWARENESS IN ACTION
Fostering Behavioural Change towards
Energy Efficiency in Europe’s School Buildings

3. Green Awareness In Action
• Wider frame:
• Need to affect citizens’ behaviour in the buildings where they live
and work, in order to improve energy efficiency
• Focus on a particular target group: essential for designing a
successful behavioral-change strategy
• GAIA:
• Educational buildings represent 17% of the non-residential building
stock in the EU
• Focusing on the educational community – students, educators,
parents…
Green Awareness in Action 3

4. Behavioral change towards energy
efficiency in school buildings
Educational approach combined with a set of applications
(a) educating children and young people to embrace
energy-efficient habits that will have sustainable results
on energy consumption
(b) focusing on students, but also hoping to affect their
family environment – cf. students’ ability to influence
choices made by their families related to environmental
issues
Green Awareness in Action 4

5. GAIA at a glance
• 3 countries
• 15 schools
• Primary schools
• Secondary schools
• Technical high schools
• 1 university building
• ~6000 students
• ~1100 educators
Green Awareness in Action 5

6. Our aim
• To raise the awareness of the users of school buildings – students
and educators – in relation to saving energy
• …and through them, of the wider local communities
• To encourage behaviours that contribute to energy efficiency in the
school building:
• We encourage students and educators to make and implement decisions related to
their everyday habits and behaviours:
• So that they can save energy …
• ..but not to the expense of the functions of the school and of living comfortably in it.
Green Awareness in Action Educational Scenarios 6

7. What we have available
• Technology:
• Equipment (sensors, meters) in school buildings:
• Mainly installed, but also portable
• Data from the school building collected through the equipment:
• Energy consumption, temperature, illumination, noise, etc
• Digital applications providing the collected data to students, educators, building managers
• A gamified online environment aiming to encourage the educational activities
• Our environmental and learning goals:
• What we want to achieve
• Our educational realities:
• What can be done, how, where, when, by whom
• Our ideas!
• All these  GAIA educational scenarios
• An open, flexible framework allowing an array of activities
Green Awareness in Action Educational Scenarios 7

8. GAIA devices installed in schools
Green Awareness in Action 8

9. • Temperature
• Relative humidity
• Illuminance (how much light)
• Motion detection (presence
in the room)
• Noise level
• CO2 concentration
• Electrical power
consumption
What is monitored in
the school building

11. We monitor and change:
• We monitor and change our use of electricity
• Of the building overall
• Of some chosen parts of it
• We try changing our use of:
• Lighting
• Air-conditioning
• Other energy-hungry devices (e.g. computers), etc
• We monitor energy consumption for heating
• We try changing behaviour in terms of:
• Timing and duration of the use of heating
• Ventilation
Green Awareness in Action Educational Scenarios 11

12. Taking into account the conditions…
• Taking ambient conditions into account:
• Light
• Temperature
• Humidity
• Other atmospheric conditions and weather
 Aim: Functional and pleasant living in the school building
Green Awareness in Action Educational Scenarios 12

13. • Raising awareness about energy efficiency
• Monitoring energy consumption in the school building
• Experimenting with changes in everyday behaviour
• Analysing the impact on energy consumption
• Deciding to take action for energy efficiency
Playful active learning
to increase energy
efficiency

14. GAIA’s power: the school community
• Technology:
• Equipment
• Data
• Digital applications
• Gamified environment
• Your environmental and learning goals:
• What you want to achieve
• Your educational realities:
• What can be done, how, where, when, by whom
• Your ideas, next to ours!
• All these  GAIA educational scenarios
• An open, flexible framework allowing an array of activities
Green Awareness in Action Educational Scenarios 14

15. We entrust the student and the educator
with the activity and the change
• The activity belongs to the community, it is not imposed
• Sharing:
• the understanding of the need to save energy
• the goal of energy efficiency in the school building
• ways to achieve the goal
• We encourage long-term engagement in the effort to achieve
the goals, by gamifying the process
Green Awareness in Action Educational Scenarios 15

16. Gamification: “GAIA Challenge”
• Web-based environment aiming to motivate
activities by the school community
• Playful framework of activities:
• We carry out quests of knowledge:
• Themes: electricity saving, heating, transportation…
• We monitor the results of our effort
• Visualisation of the collected data
• Score of our building
• Comparison of our energy savings with those of others
• We share our experiences with others.
Green Awareness in Action Educational Scenarios 16

17. GAIA Challenge Architecture
Green Awareness in Action 17

18. GAIA Map and Gamification
Green Awareness in Action 18

19. Gaia Dashboard
Green Awareness in Action 19

20. Cycles of activities
Reflecting
Discussing
Concluding
Green Awareness in Action Educational Scenarios 20
Practical activities
Gathering data and
experiences
Getting informed
Learning

21. Timing of the activities – an example
• Three parts, one week each:
• First week: Acquaintance with the topic
• GAIA offers informational / teaching materials
• Second week: Going deeper into the topic
• Relevant knowledge quests ‘unlock’ in GAIA Challenge
• Third week: Applying knowledge in practice
• Carrying out practical activities in the building, monitoring their results
• Finally: Sharing the completed activity in the online environment.
Green Awareness in Action Educational Scenarios 21

22. Working with the GAIA Lab Kit
Green Awareness in Action 22

23. Working with the GAIA Lab Kit
• The use of maker community tools and IoT technologies
inside classrooms is spreading
• In GAIA, the large IoT deployment in educational buildings
and the real-world data from this infrastructure, are
utilized to support a “maker” lab kit activity in the
classroom
• Integrated with the use of the GAIA Challenge
• Linked to the school curriculum
Green Awareness in Action 23

24. The GAIA Educational Lab Kit
• In a “hands-on” mode, students use:
• data from their school building
• IoT components and electronics
• The kit includes already assembled devices and commercial IoT
sensors and actuators
• guidance provided by the project
• Classes and lab tutorials regarding energy efficiency
• Serving as an additional means of students’ interaction
with the project, further increasing end-user engagement.
Green Awareness in Action 24

25. Mapping school building reality
• In the educational lab kit activities the focus is on mapping
what is happening in the school building in real time:
• Using a floorplan of their school as a surface to place electronic
components and devices, essentially assembling a small-scale
interactive installation.
• Conducting simple “missions” inside the different parts of their
buildings, indoors and outdoors, detecting and pinpointing specific
energy-efficiency-related rooms or devices.
Green Awareness in Action 25

26. Lab Kit IoT and hardware
• The Lab Kit includes IoT devices (commercial and GAIA-
designed) together with other hardware components that
can be used to assemble custom electrical circuits, which
can enable:
• Familiarization with electronics, using common components,
such as LEDs, resistors, switches, etc.
• Monitoring of real-world parameters, in a way similar to the fixed
IoT infrastructure installed inside GAIA school buildings, but in a
more “personalized” and direct manner.
• Interaction with GAIA software services, in similar ways to the
ones used by the infrastructure, also providing a clearer picture of
how the overall GAIA system works.
Green Awareness in Action 26

27. Making things easy
• Avoiding extensive wiring between the different components
and complicated interconnections, by using:
• Conductive ink, in order for students to “draw” the interconnections
required between the various electronic components. In this manner,
we avoid the extensive use of cables and breadboards, simplifying the
overall activity and saving time.
• Raspberry GrovePi hats, that have standardized connectors for
input/output interfaces, i.e., students and teachers do not have to
worry about how to connect the components, or where, since all
interconnections are carefully labeled to prevent confusion.
• Magnet-carrying electronic components, which enable easy
placement on top of a metal surface. The use of magnets prevents the
components from slipping and moving around during the lab kit
activity.
• Printed paper school building floorplans, which illustrate both the
parts of the building and the placement of electronic components for
the lab activity. The floorplans are placed on top of a metal surface so
that magnets are kept firmly connected during the lab activity.
Green Awareness in Action 27

28. Components utilised
• Raspberry Pi, as the device handling the main computing and
networking duties for the lab activities.
• Conductive ink markers, for sketching out wire paths onto paper. At
this point, we are using the Circuitscribe markers.
• Electronic components, such as LCD screens, resistors, switches,
potentiometers, etc. At this point, we are using Circuitscribe
components, mainly due to their magnetic clip attachments, ease of
use and overall safety.
• Sensors with standardized interfaces for connecting to the
Raspberry Pi. At this point, we are using the GrovePi, an open-
source family of sensors available from various distributors, which use
standardized interfaces and are suitable for educational activities due
to their design.
• Custom electronic boards, which ease interfacing with GAIA and
visualization of real-time data used during the lab activities. One of
such boards is the LED ring board used to visualize the 3-phase
energy consumption in the building.
Green Awareness in Action 28

29. Lab Kit software
• The Raspberry Pi devices use the Raspbian Linux distribution
• The Lab Kit activities are based on a number of Python scripts
provided by the project. The lab kit activities use the default
options for Python provided by Raspbian
• We use the standardized Web interfaces of GAIA to
communicate with the system for real-time data
• Thus no additional changes are required to the vanilla
Raspbian distribution for Raspberry Pi.
Green Awareness in Action 29

30. Organization of the Lab Kit activities
• We have prepared a series of lab activities, covering
aspects of energy consumption and efficiency inside
school buildings:
• “Energy consumption in our school”
• “Lighting inside school buildings”
• “Heating inside school buildings”
• “Temperature, Humidity and Thermal Comfort”
• “Devices and Energy efficiency”
• “Energy Inspectors - The energy footprint of our building”.
Green Awareness in Action 30

31. Educational materials
• Materials provided for the activities:
• Description of each activity and guidance
• Incl. subject, required background (theoretical and practical), short
description of the tasks to be completed (goal), difficulty levels.
• Materials for the educators
• educational objectives, methods, schedule
• Materials for the students
• Instructions and explanations.
Green Awareness in Action 31

32. Summary of a sample lab kit activity
• “Temperature, Humidity and Thermal Comfort”
• Students are given a short introduction to the aims of the activity, as well as
instructions on how to draw circuits for the lab using conductive ink, on top of a
printed floorplan of their school.
• They are then instructed to assemble a small electronic circuit using 2-color
LEDs, buttons and an LCD screen, and place the components over a
predefined set of class rooms in the floor map.
• After assembling the circuit, the students power up the Raspberry Pi’s, and
start looking into the Python code. They execute a series of available Python
scripts that connect to GAIA’s cloud infrastructure to fetch real-time data.
• They then go through a series of activities, where they see the temperature
and humidity inside their classrooms, which are visualized on the LEDs of the
circuit (e.g., red for temperatures above 25 degrees) and the LCD screen.
• They use hardware switches and buttons to navigate between different
visualization modes.
• A set of activities provides the background to assess thermal comfort levels, to
note down differences between classrooms, and try to reason the origin of
such differences due to room orientation, construction, etc.
• They also provide examples of how to customize the Python code to provide
additional functionality and visualization modes.
Green Awareness in Action 32

33. Integration of Lab Kit with GAIA Challenge
• In the form of additional quests in the Challenge, unlocked
for the schools that are participating in such activities.
• These quests are a visual “tutorial” for students to prepare
for the lab or understand better aspects such as e.g., the
wiring between specific electronic components.
• Educators can choose to “unlock” these Lab Kit-specific
quests before or after the first Lab Kit activity, in order to
familiarize students with the Lab, or repeat some of the
activities to get a better understanding of the tools used.
Green Awareness in Action 33

34. Lab Kit and other GAIA components
• Additional activities proposed to educators, suggesting
ways to integrate the rest of the GAIA tools with the lab
activities:
• e.g. in the period between two successive lab activities, students
can use the Building Manager Application to monitor environmental
parameters that they checked during a lab activity.
• They can then discuss their findings with their teachers when they
have their next lab activity at school.
• They are also encouraged to share their findings/progress on the
GAIA Challenge or Facebook page of the project.
• GAIA Challenge can also be used as homework, so that students
do not lose contact with the workshops for a long time.
Green Awareness in Action 34

35. Initial end user-evaluation
• Some preliminary results we have from the use of the lab kit in
schools in Greece in recent months.
• Still ongoing work, experiences from initial application in some
schools.
• A diverse set of end-users: Several of the schools participating
in the project have staff that uses, or is comfortable with the
use of Arduino-based activities. However, not all educators or
students have experience with such technologies.
• For a preliminary evaluation of the lab kit in classrooms, we
conducted 2 workshops with 2 groups of Greek students aged
11-15 years old (primary and secondary school students),
including 48 and 58 students in each workshop.
Green Awareness in Action 35

36. Initial end user-evaluation
• So far, we have had a very positive overall response from
both students and teachers.
• The initial results reported will be further strengthened in
the following weeks and months, as lab kit activities are
carried out in the vast majority of the schools participating
in GAIA.
• We expect close to 15 schools to have a first experience
with the lab kit in the near future, and several hundreds of
students to be involved in them.
Green Awareness in Action 36

37. Thank you!
• Presenter contact: Pavlos Koulouris, pkoulouris@ea.gr
• Project website: http://gaia-project.eu
• On Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/EUGAIAProject
• …
Green Awareness in Action 37

38. Green Awareness in Action 38