Using an Educational IoT Lab Kit and Gamification for Energy Awareness in European Schools

The use of maker community tools and IoT technologies inside classrooms is spreading in an increasing number of education and science fields. GAIA is a European research project focused on achieving behavior change for sustainability and energy awareness in schools. In this work, we report on how a large IoT deployment in a number of educational buildings and real-world data from this infrastructure, are utilized to support a "maker" lab kit activity inside the classroom, together with a serious game. We also provide some insights to the integration of these activities in the school curriculum, along with a discussion on our feedback so far from a series of workshop activities in a number of schools. Our initial results show strong acceptance by the school community.Comment: This is the submitted preprint version of a paper published in the FabLearn Europe'18 conferenc

Assessment of chemical species of lead accumulated in tidemarks of human articular cartilage by X-ray absorption near-edge structure analysis

Lead is a toxic trace element that shows a highly specific accumulation in the transition zone between calcified and non-calcified articular cartilage, the so-called ‘tidemark’. Excellent agreement has been found between XANES spectra of synthetic Pb-doped carbonated hydroxyapatite and spectra obtained in the tidemark region and trabecular bone of normal human samples, confirming that in both tissues Pb is incorporated into the hydroxyapatite crystal structure of bone. During this study the µ-XANES set-up at the SUL-X beamline at ANKA was tested and has proven to be well suited for speciation of lead in human mineralized tissue samples

Designing Effective Playful Experiences for Sustainability Awareness in Schools and Makerspaces

Sustainability awareness in young people, and especially students, is growing in importance. To this end, serious games and playful experiences are used to enable students and teachers to actively study climate change issues and respective challenges. Many approaches have been proposed, ranging from quiz-based web applications to full-blown game experiences. We discuss several related design aspects through the lens of our own experience with gamification inside educational environments. Our results derive from the use of a playful web application focusing on sustainability and energy issues, developed within the GAIA project and used in 25 schools with 3762 registered users. We also present results from surveys answered by 723 students and 32 educators. Our findings show that a simple playful experience can yield good results within educational environments when taking into account their constraints, integrating the intervention to schools’ everyday life and placing it within a strategy that includes other tools