1. Breath In, Breath Out: Does Breathing in Your Classroom Change the Quality of the Air?

    Investigation

    Goal

    To find out if CO2 levels increase in classrooms over the school day.

    Research question

    Do CO2 levels increase in closed environments that are populated with people such as classrooms?

    Equipment

    1. A CO2 sensor*
    2. A mobile device that collects data from the CO2 sensor
    3. A camera or a mobile device with a camera
    4. A pen/pencil and this template (or you can make a template of your own). 
    5. Optional: A room thermometer or an air temperature probe*.

    *If you are using Globisens or Fourier digital sensors, please refer to the Working with Probes section of the Support page for information on how to submit data from these probes to your GlobalLab Report Forms.

    Why use data from multiple participants?

    CO2 data from multiple sites can gives us a range of classroom CO2 levels and tell us which classrooms have high levels.

    Investigation Protocol

    This investigations calls for CO2 levels to be measured in one classroom twice a day—at the beginning of the school day and at the end of the school day—for a week.

    Note 1: You will need to submit a total of 10 Report Forms (two for each school day).
    Note 2: Optionally, you can measure the air temperature in the classroom when each of the CO2 level measurements is made.

    1. Download, print out and review the guidelines for the data collection (Breath In, Breath Out. Collecting Data ).
    2. Get your equipment ready and take your measurements for 5 days. Keep records in the table from the Collecting Data file.
      Note: If you are using one of the probes that support direct data transfer to GlobalLab, you do not have to write down your CO2 measurements. Your data is stored at GlobalLab. Please refer to the Working with Probes section on the Support page.
    3. Fill in and submit 10 Report Forms.
    4. Go to the Findings page and explore the results obtained by other project participants. Use GlobalLab’s charting and graphing tools to view CO2 levels at the different times.
      Do CO2 levels change over the day? Over the week?
      Are there any correlations between CO2 levels and air temperature?
    5. Discuss your findings with other participants. 

    Read More
    What does ppm means?
    It means parts per million. In other words, ppm is a measure of how much of a substance is in a mixture. In our case, ppm means how many CO2 molecules there are in a million molecules of air. For example, a CO2 reading of 1000 ppm means there are one thousand CO2 molecules in a million molecules of air. For reference, one ppm (one in a million) is like one inch in 16 miles or one second in 11.5 days.

    Report Form Before filling in the Report Form, please read the Investigation Protocol