Classroom Air Quality

UQ Study Fresh

STEM Punks was excited to visit the University of Queensland (UQ) to speak with members of the Study Fresh Project Team. Dr Stephen Snow is the team leader of the Study Fresh Project and explained that the project was a UQ initiative and made possible through funding from the Office of the Queensland Chief Scientist. The purpose of the Study Fresh Project is to improve the capacity of Queensland students to thrive at school by gathering data on the indoor air quality of classrooms. Stephen explained, “There can be issues of inadequate ventilation where Carbon Dioxide (CO2) rises from people breathing out and CO2 is a really good indicator of the likely presence of other indoor air pollutants. The reason we have to care about indoor air quality is because poor indoor air quality and poor ventilation leads to lower cognitive performance and lower performance at sustained attention tasks. It’s been correlated to poor academic performance and so it’s quite a big issue, just nobody’s measuring it.” The Study Fresh Project actively collaborates with QLD schools, to engage students as citizen scientists, to measure their school classroom’s air quality. Stephen continued, “we’ve got two options. We can deploy these Study Fresh loggers into classrooms. They (students) monitor CO2

at minute intervals and upload their data to a CSV file. The second, and arguably more fun part of Study Fresh is the workshop component where schools, if they want to, can bring classes of up to 24 students to do a workshop or at their school, to build one of these things.” Stephen reflected, “this isn’t the type of project that’s just going to be solved by one discipline. We needed a multi-disciplinary team.” Stephen explained that the Study Fresh Team includes a building engineer, civil engineer, electronics engineers, behavioural scientists, computer vision and IT specialists. Dr Marie Boden works at the UQ School of Electrical Engineering and is a part of the Study Fresh Team. Marie spoke with STEM Punks, “what we are trying to understand is what the indoor air quality does to our students and people who are working and studying indoors. What do we need to do in the future? How do we need to build our buildings and how can we actually make sure that we have really fresh, good air? Dr Boden spoke about her role, “I work a lot with outreach activities and together with teachers, I am really interested in how we can use technology to make our education even better than it is.” Rohith Nunna is the lead engineer for the Study Fresh Project. “My job is to make these little boards and also get kids excited about programming and about indoor air quality. Rohith continued, “my first task was to build this little mini unit. Once I got a system working, it was just a matter of prototyping in a couple of weeks. I managed to get a little board working and integrated all of these components together. It took a lot of testing, but we got there, and it works perfectly. That’s a great thing but we really want to get kids excited and be proactive about indoor air quality within classrooms. That’s where the workshop comes in. With this prototype, we scaled it back to the very fast prototype that I made, and we turned it into a workshop. Kids at the moment are building the very first prototype that our engineer made when we were designing this project. With the help of Marie and the team, we made sure that we turned it into a workshop. Hopefully, the kids will be proactive about it and work with these loggers and help improve their classrooms so that it’s a better working environment for them.” Dr Snow concluded, “I guess my vision for Study Fresh is twofold. Firstly, I’d love to know what environment students are learning in and we can measure it with Study Fresh. I’d love to make that bigger. I’d love to put one of these in every school, if we can.” Study Fresh is a UQ initiative made possible through funding from the Office of the Queensland Chief Scientist.