Results From a Large-Scale IoT-Based Intervention for Energy Saving and Sustainability Awareness via Behavior Change in 25 K-12 Schools in Europe

The unfolding climate crisis has resulted in a rising interest for increasing sustainability awareness and achieving energy savings worldwide. Several interventions within educational environments have been aimed at mobilizing younger audiences toward such goals. However, most of the interventions carried out so far are based on a subset of possible tools (e.g., IoT monitoring and gamification) and offer “all or nothing” approaches, which do not cope well with the uniqueness of schools and the need to adapt interventions to specific contexts (e.g. school size, building, curriculum, and teacher involvement). We present a large-scale intervention in 25 school buildings in Europe over the course of two school years. Our intervention was based on the installation of a relatively low-cost IoT infrastructure in schools, that produced real-time energy-related data from the school buildings involved, and the application of a strategy combining, in a flexible and customizable way, educational activities, monitoring tools, gamification, and competition to motivate behavior change and achieve energy savings. Overall, 2983 students and 204 educators were directly involved to a variable degree of participation. Our results indicate a positive overall result in terms of short-term energy savings in most schools involved, with an average reduction of 20%–25% in the energy that could be affected by end-users, as well as a 32.9% increase after the intervention in students self-reporting good or very good sustainability awareness. These findings suggest that such interventions can be a valuable step toward educating young students regarding sustainability and toward sustainable schools, if designed and implemented properly.