Lecture on air quality and joint sensor building by pupils from your school
An ideal tool for schools to revise feps in the field of informatics.
Data and modelling, algorithms and programming, information system, digital technologies.
Problem definition
The biggest health risk in the Czech Republic is air purity. Every year, 10,190 inhabitants die prematurely as a result of air pollution. The total annual social cost of air pollution in the Czech Republic is more than EUR 6 billion; that's CZK 13,850 per citizen per year. General awareness of this problem is minimal. Source: European Environment Agency.
Proposed solution
We offer primary and secondary schools in the Czech Republic the opportunity to build their own Air Sensor in their school as part of their education. The construction of the sensor KIT is combined with a lecture on air cleanliness. The construction of the sensor is trivial, can be done by pupils from 2nd grade primary school and takes only a few minutes. The sensor is connected to the WI-FI directly at the school and placed outdoors. The sensor measures PM10, PM2.5 temperature and humidity in real time and informs pupils and parents. The data is displayed in a widget on the school website, providing visualizations and a freely accessible data archive. Pupils then learn to evaluate the data.
An assessment of the situation will be published in the annual project report; schools will receive a certificate confirming the achievement of digital competences.
Benefits for the city
We will raise awareness of the atmosphere and its impact on human health. Pupils will acquire skills related to the connection of an electronic sensor and work with big data. It permeates from the bottom on the axis pupil – parent – grandparent, we aim for a great intervention in the community. We support creativity and programming, teach data analysis, work with map and graphs. Subjects from physics, chemistry to biology and sociology are intertwined here. Pupils gain not only language experience with similar international communities. We build positive publicity for the city, generate freely accessible data for residents. We complement the measurements of official sensors.
If you are interested, the school will get its own pin on the map with a link in the Sensor2School section. We create a school network of international communities that can work together. The main map of Sensor.Community has 6,500 views per day. The project is part of the CitiMeasure (Eurocities) pilot.
Feasibility
The Sensor.Community project has been fully operational since 2016. Detailed instructions on how to build the sensor, along with a shopping list of parts, are available in 24 languages. The necessary software is available in the source code: a program to read the sensor data, input and output APIs, a flash program to load the software, a map to display the results and the website itself. There are 13,200 sensors in operation worldwide in 72 countries, and together they have collected 19,583,726,396 measurements. Connecting dozens of sensors to this infrastructure is not a problem and is currently being done, for example, in Paris. It is a project that has a certain future, it is community-based, decentralised.
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