Raising awareness among young people on energy-saving issues is considered as one of the keys to meeting the European Union’s goals for the near future on sustainability. In addition, on average, school buildings in the EU account for 17% of the total surface area (in sq. Meters) of non-residential buildings. In practice this means that a significant part of the total EU energy consumption takes place in the school buildings, while the energy behavior of the students is also transferred to the rest of citizens’ daily lives. Therefore, saving energy from teachers and pupils in school buildings can have positive and tangible results in a large context.
With this in mind, the GAIA project (Green Awareness in Action, funded under Horizon 2020 by the EU and EASME) is addressed to the educational community and has developed a platform combining sensors, educational activities and a set of applications. The goal is to achieve energy savings by teachers and students by harnessing the tools offered by GAIA and changing their behavior within school buildings.
The project is being implemented by 8 EU partners, with pilot actions underway in numerous schools in Greece, Italy, and Sweden.
In total, 22 Greek schools have participated in the project’s activities so far, with the first results from the implementation of the project’s proposed actions showing that energy savings of 10% -20% can be achieved in areas such as building lighting, or consumption by devices such as computers, simply through more sensible management and responsible behavior of students and teachers.
At the same time, the teachers who participated in the project had the opportunity to integrate its tools into their lesson plans, giving a different dimension to the traditional teaching methods for courses such as Informatics and Physics, or Environmental
Education.
More information is available at the project wesbite: http://gaia-project.eu and youtube channel: https://youtu.be/97ooDARAdFM
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