We are very excited to
be part of the GAIA project
because it enables
the students to check
from data gathered from sensors installed
in this school
the values of humidity, temperature, current
and therefore these data
were really used to make
applied science as
is the meaning of our
school, we are a lyceum of applied sciences
and it is of fundamental importance
to bring concreteness to students
about the data we live and
we work on every day
My students have been playing the GAIA
Challenge and they thought it was fun.
As a teacher, it was
very easy to start
a short introduction and then the
students worked with it on their own
They also played in their leisure
time and thought it was great fun
We had a contest where the best class in
the least time got a cake as a reward
I've even had students in the
technology programme who
were given the task of
building the Raspberry Pi's
Pi's that they fitted together and mounted
the sensors. They have made this box
they drew it in a CAD program and
printed it out on our 3D printer
Then they were installing
these kinds of cases
in eight different
classrooms at the school
and then these students
simply kept track of the
different data measurements
in these classrooms
and came up with proposals for
improvements to simply use less energy
One of the actions they
discovered was that we
have to change the lights
just in the classroom
as in the classroom here we have
changed the lights to LED lights
and now the plan is that in coming years
to replace all classroom lights to LEDs
The labs helped on one hand to understand
how we measure the environmental
factors, by doing simple activities e.g.
windows, doors, lights.
They saw from the measurements
that these changes happened.
On the other hand the labs helped
students and in learning environment
e.g. variables, code, circuits, electronic
circuits, hardware, programming languages.
In our school we work with
Arduino, sensors and IDE language.
So we had the opportunity to learn more.
I think the questions was not so
much fun, the game it was ok, but
I think the most fun was when
we built those little computers
and it was fun to code them
and learn how to do that
and then when we saw that we
put them up in a classroom
and found a good location for them
and then we watched, like, how the warmth
in the classroom changed for the day
The students learned a lot
and they were very excited
when they realized the right answers.
They liked a lot
the various types of questions i.e.
videos, multiple
choice questions, searching,
fill in gaps in text, etc.
And besides the students' initial
curiosity for the challenge,
the ability to check their score and
ranking position,
the project has been also
particularly useful for us
because for example
we use excel, spreadsheets,
and instead of making graphs of invented
data, the students manipulated
real data taken
by the sensors instalkled in their school
and this had a positive impact.
I noticed that compared to previous
years the students were
happier to see this
processing and these
charts come out of
their school's data
