Students’ behaviour analysis based on correlating thermal comfort and spatial simulations; case study of a schoolyard in Shiraz City

Abstract

The significant impact of outdoor school environments on student behaviour highlights the need to study how students interact with their surroundings. This has become a central focus in recent educational research, leading scholars to use various methods to gain insight into student movement behaviour. This research introduces a novel data-driven spatial gridding technique, employing thermal comfort and space syntax evaluation through ENVI-met and depthMapX software. It validates the extracted climatic and spatial heatmaps using real-time drone footage and Python programming to map and visualize student movement patterns. The findings from the Pearson correlation analysis in the Orange Software suggest that the correlated spatial-thermal heatmap better represents students’ actual behaviour with a high correlation coefficient of 0.84 (p = 0.84). Furthermore, this study sheds light on how students’ dynamic and static behaviours are linked to the schoolyard’s thermal and spatial characteristics. In conclusion, this research innovatively combines real-time monitoring with dual-simulations to analyze student movement behaviour, providing valuable insights into specific schoolyard dynamics.