You have the data - now how to improve it

OK, you have looked at the numbers and can see that things need to change:
here are some targets and strategies to get started with on a project which aims to Make Learning Better:

SUMMARY

• Light (lux) above 500 for learning work - we aim for 750+ in schools we work with.
• We recommend temperature between 18 and 21°C, no more. 
• CO2 levels must be under 1,000 parts per million. Even slightly higher levels mean that concentration - and health - will suffer noticeably.
• We would expect sound in normal circumstances to be under 70db with 72 as the point when things start to get distracting. 
• A rapid sound tempo seems to damage concentration - certainly keeping under 100bpm would be very desirable, and under 80bpm would be seem wise until we know more. That means minimising fan tempos, and other mechanical rhythms as well as any background musak.
• TVOCs and PM2.5 are measures of pollution and children in schools with poor pollution scores can drop as much as a full school year of progress during their school lives. Makes the pandemic look trivial in terms of losses! Try to get to zero!
• Humidity is a mix of good health and trying to minimise aerosol inhalation danger. Try to keep between 40% and 60%

Crucially, we are still working on the interrelationships with these variables: for example if light is too low AND it's too hot is there a multiplier effect and what is the magnitude?

SPECIFIC MEDIATIONS

LIGHT LEVELS

Three big changes are very easy to implement:

• Get light into the room, usually by getting all the paper off the windows (invoke a schoolwide "glass means glass" protocol maybe?) - some pruning of outside shrub or tree branches may help too.
• Next lift the levels of light reflected from walls and ceilings - basically repaint surfaces with a high refraction index paint.  Our favourite paint is Dulux Light + Space paint - available from the usual DIY places - it is really impressive and you can get it all done in a weekend - 40% better light reflection.
• Finally, the lights themselves could use a bit of investment. Don't replace them; these days there are good LED substitutes for whatever bulbs you have. They can transform the light in the room relatively cheaply, but with very low power consumption and no distracting flicker. Eschew the "warm white" and "blue white" options and just go for bright pure white with high Kelvin values (5-6K).

If you haven't yet got hold of a Learnometer, mobile phones make very accurate lux meters with lots of (mainly free) apps to allow your students to survey the school for the best learning spaces.

Phones can measure light and sound particularly well. 136 lux is very very poor!

TEMPERATURE & HUMIDITY

This sounds easy - cut the heating, open the windows, etc. But in practice it is initially hard to convince the students ("Can I keep my coat on?" (No) and so on). 

If you don't have a Learnometer yet, the simplest measure is a cheap plastic garden max - min thermometer. Label it with "good learning" for the scale 18-21°C and "not good" for the temperatures outside of this range...

Humidity may be tougher; keeping between 40% and 60% may partly be the result of where you live. But there are a couple of things that help: 

• Too much humidity?
  No rugs - they really do store up damp given half a chance. Shoeless helps too, less damp walked into the room; 
  Fill a biggish basket with charcoal briquettes - they will cut moisture and work for a couple of months (and you can still barbecue after with them!). Silica based cat litter works too (but perhaps not on the barbecue afterwards...) 
• Too little humidity
  And of course plants, with moist soil around the roots can be helpful too.

SOUND VOLUME & RHYTHMS

Of course, proper acoustic modelling and sound absorbing panels are ideal, but in the absence of these many other ideas are effective too:

Hanging umbrellas from the ceiling upside down (each student brings and decorates their own - use white canopies to help light levels). Then fill the umbrellas with fibreglass wool ("rockwool") of the kind ceilings were once insulated with. One tech / science project later and you will have quantified the sound changes.

Or even simpler, fix an old tablet, perhaps an out-of-date iPad or phone, to the wall (Velcro pads), leave a power supply connected and run one of the many decibel metering apps, saying to the students, simply, "In this corner we expect sounds below 70db" and then then ask the children to monitor the screen. You could select daily Sound Monitor students (below, at Hargrave Park) - to remind their peers when the numbers go above that. Usually, they will have already noted the numbers and hushed each other - it's all about protocols, agency and expectations.

CO2

Carbon Dioxide is a heavy gas. Opening windows and doors helps, but it is much more effective if air is moved around too. A closed room full of breathing students quickly (within 30 mins often) fills with CO2, even more so in exam halls.

In these graphs (below) you can clearly see the difference between no windows or doors open (the steep upper line), just windows open (the middle 2 lines - CO2 "pools" below window sill height) and windows plus door open (the "safe" lowest line):

However, as well as ventilation, we can use plants to absorb CO2 and add Oxygen. The best plants do this very well - we have a list of the best - and we have a lot of detail about plants mediating high levels of CO2.

See https://heppell.net/byop (bring your own plant)

AIR POLLUTION

As we observe elsewhere, if you are in a high pollution location, then it is unlikely that relocating a school will be possible. However, one positive change can be to pass a portable polution meter around parents - many of these generate map readings / routes as they are carried around. This allows you to map and recommend the lowest pollution routes walking to school - perhaps avoiding walking alongside a major road for example, or re-routing through the park, if there is one.

Since the pandemic began, we have seen some alarmingly high TVOC readings. These are almost always the result of over aggresive cleaning materials and the high levels of TVOC resulting are damaging to the children. As one Learnometer school commented::

"we have cleaned the rooms but brainwashed the kids!"

The answer is to audit your cleaning materials. For CoVID, soap based washing with warm water if probably good enough.

Air filtration equipment is available and because it is much used in the health service, really quite affordaable. We are evaluating this and will post here when we have findings..

all rights reserved - patents pending

this page created February 2014, last modified Wednesday, May 26, 2021 12:06 PM