Children using electronic sensors to create and use knowledge on environmental health

Abstract

The Eco-sensors4Health Project (Eco-sensors for health: Supporting children to create eco-healthy schools) is centered on the use of electronic sensors by children to become agents in the creation of healthy and sustainable environments in schools. In this Project, the environmental health data, acquired by children with the sensors, with tablets or mobile phones, is managed with the support of a collaborative platform that allows entering, searching and visualizing data of the different schools. The Eco-sensors4Health Toolkit is a guide to the implementation of the environmental health activities in schools, which include the exploratory sensorial tasks, the environmental data acquisition, organization and interpretation, and the decision making to improve schools’ environmental health. The iterative development processes of the Eco-sensors4Health Platform and Toolkit are presented in this paper as well as illustrative results of its uses in different schools. Those results indicate that the use of sensors by children in the context of authentic environmental health activities makes it possible to children to create and apply knowledge to solve schools’ environmental health problems.