Abstract:

Most school buildings in Europe are dated and present poor furnishing as well as environmental and spatial conditions. In many cases, these school buildings do not fulfil the present requirements in what regards students’ physical and cognitive well-being and academic performance.

Within this context, the ‘Classroom 4.0 - wellbeing resources’ project aims to research the impact of learning spaces’ environmental conditions (temperature, lighting, noise, humidity, etc.) on students’ performance and to identify methods and technologies of monitoring (non-intrusive and nuisance) students' health and well-being parameters influencing school performance.

This project is divided into different activities. Activity 1 is based on preliminary studies and comprises:
i) analysis of the relations between students' well-being parameters and academic performance;
ii) research and analysis of technologies for monitoring well-being parameters;
iii) definition of guiding principles and concepts for creating a Classroom 4.0. Activity 2 focuses on the technical and functional specifications and Activity 3 on the development of the Classroom 4.0 line, namely its’ prototypes, a central platform and an application (for the teacher) and the Classroom 4.0 pilot installation. Finally, the last activity corresponds to tests and trials for monitoring f well-being and health parameters (hard tech) - establishment of baseline, and project validation in a Classroom 4.0 pilot classroom environment.

This research is taking place in four Portuguese primary school classrooms from public and private sector, with 4 teachers and 81 students in total. Two different moments were defined for data collection: an initial one, which took place during the 2021/2022 school year, and a second one that will happen during 2022/2023. Collected data gathers information regarding classrooms’ environmental conditions as well as students’ performance and is being analysed and compared between classrooms through quantitative methods. These results will allow to establish baseline parameters for classrooms’ environmental conditions monitoring and enable a comparative analysis between the two moments of data collection.

The project will culminate with the development of prototype solutions (new generation of school furniture with IoT (Internet of things) technology and respective intelligent technological platforms) for a future Classroom, to be validated in the pilot classrooms (primary school).

Keywords:

Learning spaces environmental conditions, students’ well-being, students’ academic performance, primary schools.