Eco-STEAM Challenge Green Hotel

It is important to study climate change from the earliest school days. It is also a great opportunity for a STEM approach to learning and learning science through hands-on experiences. In this article, we will present some of our experiences in working with students.

With our students we participated in the Eco-STEAM Challenge together with 11 other schools from Serbia, Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina.

This competition, within the Scientik network, aimed to raise awareness about climate change and possible mitigation measures.

In the course of a month, students regularly measured the temperature and humidity of the air around our school in four selected places. Using the Arduino set, we made a temperature and air humidity device. We later processed the obtained data and made a proposal for improving the school environment in order to mitigate at least a little the effect of climate change in our micro environment.

Our school is located in the center and is surrounded on three sides by busy streets.

During April, the students also conducted an experiment testing the air quality in different parts of the school yard. They came to the conclusion that the air is most polluted in the part of the park that is next to the main street and the large parking lot.

Knowing that the air is not heated directly by the sun's rays, but rather by the foundation, which later emits the energy it has absorbed, we realize that it is important what materials we are surrounded by. Asphalt, concrete, brick are among those that heat the air the most. Guided by that knowledge, we came up with the idea of how to adjust our space (school yard) and thereby reduce heating, but also enable other species to come and live in our environment.

By measuring during the project, we came to the conclusion that in some days, in addition to high temperatures, we also had extremely low humidity. Plants have the effect of increasing air humidity, so our proposal for adjusting the yard will also take this into account.

We would make a natural environment (hotel) for insects out of metal construction and wood. In this way, we will encourage the presence of insects for which our climate is a natural habitat and strengthen urban biodiversity.

That's how the whole project got the name "Hotel in our school for insects is cool".

We had the opportunity to share our experience with colleagues from Serbia, Turkey and Portugal within the project Learn and Experience Science Together Online (lestoproject.com) where we created learning scenarios. One of the scenarios was created precisely on the topic of global warming.