CarboSchools-SchoolCO2Web

CarboSchools
SchoolCO2web

Advice for teachers

If you as a teacher would like to work with the data of the SchoolCO2web, we advise you to read the document Working with atmospheric CO₂ levels in the classroom (you can also download it in French). This document gives a clear overview of the main processes in the atmosphere influencing the CO₂ concentration. Moreover, several suggestions are given on how to use the data of the SchoolCO2web in the classroom. At the end of the document, you can find practical tutorials on how to work with the data in Excel. These tutorials are supported by the video's at the bottom of the page.

History of SchoolCO2web

A few years ago the Center for IsotopeResearch and the Department of Education (IDO) of the University of Groningen (Netherlands) started a cooperation with 3 secondary schools to set up the SchoolCO2web. The schools placed a CO₂ meter and a weatherstation on their roofs. They send the atmospheric measurements via a school computer automatically to a central database of the CIO. Measurements of this database are by means of a simple tool publicly available as a graph or spreadsheet and can be used for educational an scientific purposes.

Since April 2007 the SchoolCO2web has participated in the Teacher Scientist Partnerships (TSP) project. The goal of this European Comenius project among other things is to increase the learning capabilities of pupils by involving them in practical tasks which are carried out by scientific institutes. Now we have incorporated SchoolCO2web into the CarboSchools project and we aim to connect approximately 15 schools in 5 different countries to the SchoolCO2web (educational benefits).

Educational benefits of SchoolCO2web

The goal of the SchoolCO2web is to give pupils more insight into the carbon cycle and the fluctuations of CO₂ in the atmosphere. This is a multidisciplinary topic, which includes mathematics, physics, chemistry and biology.

Pupils also learn how to extract valuable information from a large dataset by means of spreadsheet programs and statistics. Data analysis is an important skill within scientific research. In this way, this project creates a bridge between secondary school and University. Moreover, you bring science closer to the pupils, because the measurements take place in the schools themselves and the measurements might be useful within scientific research.

The SchoolCO2web is a project involving a European network of schools. This emphasizes the international nature of the greenhouse gas science and opens up possibilities for project cooperation between pupils from different countries.

Note! Due to calibration problems with the Vaisala CO₂ meter it is, at this moment, not possible to make any absolute comparisons between the data of different schools. We hope to solve this problem in the near future.

Additional information & support for SchoolCO2Web

Support website: additional information and support to join, build and maintain in measuring CO₂ data together with other schools in Europe can be found on this website.

Tutorials

SchoolCO2web tutorial 02 Correlation between CO₂ conc and av wind speed