Energy in Schools: Promoting Global Change through Social Technical Deployments

Reducing carbon emissions is a key priority across the globe, and in the UK, schools have been identified as the second largest users of non-domestic energy. In this paper, we present an IoT solution for schools that aims to unite senior leadership, teachers, and pupils in the goal of reducing or shifting their energy consumption and carbon emissions. We achieve this by prompting behavioural change through instrumenting schools with sensors, visual displays, and a variety of educational resources which use the BBC micro:bit to interact with the data produced by these sensors, enabling pupils to engage in educational activities to solve real world problems. By increasing the visibility, availability, and interactivity of data, we enable a new space for dialogue between facilities managers and building users. We summarise some of the challenges and lessons learned so far, with preliminary results indicating our approach is effective in raising the profile of energy management and shifting demand. Future monitoring and evaluation will provide more detail on the effectiveness of our IoT solution.