research-article

Energy in Schools: Empowering Children to Deliver Behavioural Change for Sustainability

Authors:

Lorraine Underwood,

Joe FinneyAuthors Info & Claims

IDC '22: Proceedings of the 21st Annual ACM Interaction Design and Children Conference

Pages 308 - 314

https://doi.org/10.1145/3501712.3529744

Published: 27 June 2022 Publication History

Abstract

This short paper introduces Energy in Schools, an interactive platform designed to improve energy efficiency in UK schools through a combination of environmental measurement and behavioural change. Uniquely, Energy in Schools is designed to empower all the stakeholders within a school, including children, teachers and leadership groups to reduce their energy costs and carbon emissions. The paper reports on the motivation and design of the platform, a discussion on how interactive materials and educational activities were developed to raise awareness and understanding of energy and the climate emergency, how children led activities were used to instrument and analyses energy use via child friendly Internet of Things technologies. Finally, an analysis of its success in encouraging behavioural change through the qualitative and quantitative evaluation of a live deployment across 20 schools is presented. Overall, it was observed that encouraging multiple stakeholders to work together interactively can decrease energy consumption in the majority of schools by over 5%.

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Cited By

Underwood LEdwards ERubegni EHodges SVidler JFinney JStone JYuen TShoop LRebelsky SPrather J(2025)Toolkit for Educators of Data Science: Using Physical Computing to Support Data Science Education in the ClassroomProceedings of the 56th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education V. 110.1145/3641554.3701970(1141-1147)Online publication date: 12-Feb-2025
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3641554.3701970
Underwood LFinney JRubegni EHodges S(2024)Tangible tools for data science educationProceedings of the 19th WiPSCE Conference on Primary and Secondary Computing Education Research10.1145/3677619.3678134(1-2)Online publication date: 16-Sep-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3677619.3678134
Underwood LBall THodges SRubegni Ede Halleux PFinney J(2024)MicroCode: live, portable programming for children via roboticsAdjunct Proceedings of the 37th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology10.1145/3672539.3686334(1-3)Online publication date: 13-Oct-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3672539.3686334
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cover image ACM Conferences

IDC '22: Proceedings of the 21st Annual ACM Interaction Design and Children Conference

June 2022

718 pages

ISBN:9781450391979

DOI:10.1145/3501712

Copyright © 2022 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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SIGCHI: ACM Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

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Published: 27 June 2022

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Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, UK Government

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IDC '22

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SIGCHI

IDC '22: Interaction Design and Children

June 27 - 30, 2022

Braga, Portugal

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Overall Acceptance Rate 172 of 578 submissions, 30%

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IDC '25

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Interaction Design and Children

June 23 - 26, 2025

Reykjavik , Iceland

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Cited By

Underwood LEdwards ERubegni EHodges SVidler JFinney JStone JYuen TShoop LRebelsky SPrather J(2025)Toolkit for Educators of Data Science: Using Physical Computing to Support Data Science Education in the ClassroomProceedings of the 56th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education V. 110.1145/3641554.3701970(1141-1147)Online publication date: 12-Feb-2025
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3641554.3701970
Underwood LFinney JRubegni EHodges S(2024)Tangible tools for data science educationProceedings of the 19th WiPSCE Conference on Primary and Secondary Computing Education Research10.1145/3677619.3678134(1-2)Online publication date: 16-Sep-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3677619.3678134
Underwood LBall THodges SRubegni Ede Halleux PFinney J(2024)MicroCode: live, portable programming for children via roboticsAdjunct Proceedings of the 37th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology10.1145/3672539.3686334(1-3)Online publication date: 13-Oct-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3672539.3686334
Gutierrez-Rivera EEscobar-Sierra MPolanco JMiralles F(2024)An organizational sustainability framework for Latin American Catholic schools in the La Salle network. A cross-national study using structural equations modelingInternational Journal of Educational Management10.1108/IJEM-09-2023-045938:5(1480-1502)Online publication date: 10-Jun-2024
https://doi.org/10.1108/IJEM-09-2023-0459
Vasalou AGauthier A(2024)The role of CCI in supporting children’s engagement with environmental sustainability at a time of climate crisisInternational Journal of Child-Computer Interaction10.1016/j.ijcci.2023.10060538:COnline publication date: 27-Feb-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1016/j.ijcci.2023.100605
Tamashiro MSchaper MJensen AHeick RDanielsen BVan Mechelen MJensen KSmith RIversen O(2023)Teaching technical and societal aspects of IoT - A case study using the Orbit IoT KitProceedings of the 2023 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference10.1145/3563657.3596092(1236-1247)Online publication date: 10-Jul-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3563657.3596092

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