What if every student’s balcony could become a small environmental station? Citizension brings together Citizens and a Vision: a city where schools and the municipality build, together, a network of sensors that measures air quality and noise pollution, and use the data to decide how to make life in the city better.
An educational platform for teachers and students
Citizension is a free online platform, written in Greek, that gives teachers and students everything they need to work with the Internet of Things and smart cities in the classroom:
- Background material: what IoT and smart cities are, what air pollution and noise pollution are, and how the Arduino works.
- Step-by-step scenarios, from simple to advanced: Arduino Blink — the first step for beginners; Smart Buildings & IoT — temperature and humidity monitoring with a DHT11 sensor, building on IEEE’s TryEngineering material and on a paper our members presented at the Panhellenic Conference of Informatics Teachers in 2019; and Smart Kozani IoT System — an Arduino Uno with an Ethernet shield, an Adafruit CCS811 air-quality sensor (CO₂ and volatile organic compounds) and an Adafruit MAX9814 microphone, sending live measurements to the Ubidots cloud.
- A mathematical approach to IoT: students use real measurements to compute averages, minimums and maximums, and classify noise levels as low, medium or high risk.
- Simulation without hardware: guides and examples with Tinkercad, so schools can start before they buy any equipment.
Awarded in “Kozani 2030”
The platform was designed for the 3rd student programming competition “Kozani 2030: Climate-Neutral and Smart City”, in the Smart Living category of the Digital Transformation and Smart City axis. A five-member committee of university faculty, the Regional Directorate of Education and the Municipality of Kozani evaluated the entries. Citizension won 3rd place in the PhD candidates category, and the team received the award on 1 July 2022.
Part of the work was also presented at the 3rd Scientix Panhellenic Conference on STEM Education in September 2022.
The team
- Kleopatra Gkola, PhD candidate, Department of Informatics
- Christos Hitiris
- Georgia Fasoula
- Eleftheria Pierratou, Department of Mathematics
- Anthi Tsiftsian, Department of Mathematics
- Vangelis Nestoridis
Thanks
To Dr. Dimitrios Vergados and the Telecommunications, Networks and Distributed Systems Laboratory for hosting the platform; to the IEEE Student Branch for the sensors and equipment; and to the Municipality of Kozani for the opportunity to take part.
Links
- Visit the platform: https://ieee.cs.uowm.gr/citizension/
- Competition results: https://cs.uowm.gr/diagonismos-programmatismoy-kozani-2030-klimatika-oydeteri-exypni-poli/
- See also: Educational Activities, Robotics & STEAM (Portfolio)