New to the IOT in Schools Project?

This guide is for teachers new to the IOT in Schools project and would like an introduction. Local authority schools in the southeast of Scotland (East Lothian, Edinburgh, Fife, Midlothian, Scottish Borders and West Lothian) have the offer of sensors, gateway and associated web services, free of charge from the University of Edinburgh.. You do not need any technical expertise to support your class on this project. It is largely numeracy and science!

Step 1 - Have you got a LoRaWAN Gateway in School?

If you have been given a Lorawan Gateway similar to this device, the first thing to do is plug the adapter into an electrical socket.  It is best located somewhere where it will not be switched off and preferably not inside a metal cupboard.   It has to be turned on 24/7/365 as it will listen for any sensors that you have in the school and local community and then transfer the data to the University of Edinburgh.

Note - If you have not been given a Lorawan Gateway device, it is likely that your local authority digital team have already installed it in school. These network-installed gateways are more efficient and effective than the 4G gateway devices.  If you are unsure if a gateway is already working in your school, contact tommy.lawson@ed.ac.uk.

Tektelic Gateway

Step 2 - Find your Indoor Environment Sensors

Every school is given a small number of Indoor Environment Sensors like the ones in the image below.  Some also have a small LCD screen, and others have a solar panel. These could measure...

  • Temperature
  • Humidity
  • Presence
  • Atmospheric Pressure
  • CO2
  • Light Levels

... and send the data every 10 minutes to the University's servers for display as a line graph.

Notes

  • The sensors and gateway do not need to be physically connected. The sensors have batteries in them (3 - 5 years life) and transmit the data by a radio connection to the gateway
  • The batteries are not AA so please don't try to replace them
Elsys Sensor

Step 3 - Lesson Guides and Teaching

No complicated setup is required, and the technology usually works out of the box.  The first thing that you should do before setting the learners loose with the sensors is to check that the data is coming through from your school.

On a computer, tablet or mobile phone.  Open up the following website. https://learn.iot.ed.ac.uk  and click on sensor data.

Learn IOT Website

Click on the Link to sensor data in schools

Sensor Data Web Page

Choose which school region you are in and your school name.

Then, when the list of sensors appears, choose the one that you would like to view.  Note that sensors with a green background are sending data and sensors with a red background are not.

Grafana School Dashboard

This is the data from your chosen sensor...

Grafana Sensor Dashboard

Step 4 - Give the sensors to the learners

We've found in most schools that the best way to engage learners with the sensor data is to let them explore and discover the environment around them in data.

Many schools opt to give two sensors to a class so that they can use one to collect the ambient data from the indoor environment and place the other in a location that would produce some different data, for example, the dining room, library, HT's Office, school kitchen, greenhouse.  The sensors can go anywhere as long as they are kept dry.  Under the eaves on a hut in the playground would be fine but outside in the open would get it too wet.

Before looking at the lesson guides that you may be interested in, spend five minutes a week encouraging them to describe what they see on the graphs...

  • Why does the CO2  increase gradually when school starts in the morning?
  • Is there any data that can tell you when the school breaks are?
  • When does it get light in the morning and dark in the evening?
  • What units are used on the horizontal and vertical axes?
  • What is atmospheric pressure?
  • Look at a weather app or website and see how the temperature in the classroom compares with that outside.

Their dialogue and vocabulary when describing the data will develop throughout this period.

Step 5 - Look through the lesson guides

Choose one that suits you. You can do a little part of one or a combination of several.  All the lesson guides are tagged to CfE and are presented in MS Word, MS PowerPoint, and PDF formats.

Link to lesson guides - https://www.ed.ac.uk/information-services/iot/learn-iot/lesson-guides

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