EfficienC°

A small, portable device to check the room temperature of classrooms for optimizing energy costs and students' learning conditions.

We have wired up a prototype from a spare breadboard, LEDs and thermistor, which can be put in any classroom. When it is too cold or hot a light will come on to indicate.

Very soon, a microcontroller will be added on which will store the data of the temperature over time.

Our hope is to make a few more of this device so we will have a tool to accurately assess the effectiveness of indoor heating e.g. across buildings or within buildings.

As well as speaking for the people using a room, this is a cheap way to work out the effectiveness of current heating schedules.

Temperatures in some classrooms are consistently (some others inconsistently) kept too hot or cold. This does not help:

1. Students to be at their peak concentration in class
2. in the case of overheating Dollar Academy's aim for a low carbon footprint.

People affected include all of the classes that use these classrooms, parents and people who live in the immediate community (~1600 people by some means or another).

Primarily, the solution has been created with the intention of it serving those in the Dollar Academy community. This community consists of teachers, students, parents and everyone else who works at or comes into Dollar Academy. At the moment, Dollar suffers from very inefficiently heated classrooms which has a negative impact on areas of life at the Academy.

One unfavourable impact is the impact it has on the environment. As I type, the world wrestles with climate change and the damage it causes to the people all over the globe. This is not helped by any careless overconsumption of energy like at Dollar. Furthermore, there are impacts on the social and financial side in that students are uncomfortable and have their education impeded on. Moreover, there is a waste of money that could be better spent elsewhere.

Our solution aims to address these issues by using our device to measure these inefficiencies and alert people of the problem. This should allow for the necessary action to be taken and the room's heating to be better managed, as well as logging it to a master database to measure the efficiency on a wider scale. Overall, this should benefit the Dollar community and give a solution to the problem.

A decent amount of research has been done to understand the needs of the Dollar community. A survey of those particularly affected by the inefficiently heated classrooms has been completed e.g. students who learn in particularly hot or cold classrooms. To understand the problem at hand fully, examples of similar situations of inefficient heating have been analysed as well, to try and gain a better awareness of the problem. The general consensus so far seems to be one of near total agreement: that the buildings are damaging to the school environment both socially and financially. This has given our team increased motivation from the backing of many from the Dollar community.

We find ourselves at the concept stage due to the relative recentness of the idea for the project and due to the busy time of year with examinations nearing at our school. At the time of writing, there are no prototypes of the product. It is currently all theoretical but with the intention to begin focusing on a working prototype as soon as possible. Post-exams, we plan to put considerably more effort and time into the project but as of right now, we remain in the concept stage.

Analogue electronics currently power our solution.

We want to connect this system to a digital microcontroller for its ability to store and retrieve logged information.

Within the coming year, we aim to have our project help multiple classrooms around the school. In the future, we hope to have it operating in most  of of the classrooms in Dollar. This would affect roughly 1200 people on a day-to-day basis.

Our intended impacts:

• To have the classrooms around the school heated to a better standard
• To lessen our school's carbon footprint
• To better pupil's educational attainment
• To reduce heating bills and then use those saved finances for other environmental projects for the school

We will do this through regulating classroom temperatures with our device.

For our project, we will be adopting an iterative development methodology. At the time of writing, the analysis stage has been completed and we plan to move swiftly on to design. We estimate the implementation stage to take up around a month and a half. These time deadlines will be what we use to get an idea of our progress.

In terms of impact, after testing, we will evaluate the success of the project by reviewing people's opinions and feelings on how effective they believe the device to be.

Current barriers to progressing with the project are mainly social. In Scotland, we have the most important examinations of high school coming up within the next few months (along with preliminary exams also). This may impede on the project's progress simply due to the amount of time spent revising.

We live in the place we want to make an impact on.

The two of us have some experience working on out of school projects with technology, as well as learning the relevant physics, engineering and computing science (between us) in grades 9 and 10.