Our Learning Environment

Aims of the initiative

Children spend 90% of their time indoors and much of that time is spent in school. To foster children’s health and academic achievement, healthy school environments must be achieved? "Our Learning Environment" aims to work with schools to identify the potential impact that the indoor environment has on learning.  For example, lack of ventilation in the afternoon can create a hot stuffy environment which can impact on comfort and learning.  By monitoring indoor parameters, this can be evaluated and changes made such as opening windows, to improve the air quality.  This project aims to allow monitoring of the environment and perception assessment with pupils and teachers.

Objectives

By working with schools a number of different methods will be used:

• On-line monitoring of key parameters for indoor air quality with visible reporting.
• Collection of data from the children and the staff – how do they perceive indoor air quality - through simple questionnaires.
• Provision of simple and understandable visualisation of the data and easy access to the data for the children and staff.
• Develop, in close co-operation with the schools, simple and practical tools that can help the school to work systematically with indoor air issues, for example; uploading photographs for the children/staff to report environmental conditions and observations of things that may affect the indoor environment.

How is the indoor environment in schools assessed?

The indoor air quality at the school is monitored by four sensor units from Atmospheric Sensors, which measure the following parameters:

• Temperature
• Relative Humidity
• Carbon dioxide
• Carbon monoxide
• Particulate Matter 
• Nitrogen dioxide
• Nitrogen oxide
• Noise

Pictures of the sensor units are shown below: 

	Atmospheric Sensors Unit	Obeo AS unit

Like further information on the CITI-SENSE project in Edinburgh? Please contact us at citisense@iom-world.org 

Return to Home page

Administrator