The Sensor Station project is dedicated to acquiring environmental data for climate and air quality awareness. To accomplish that, it aims at the DIY-education of high school students for measuring, analyzing, and interpreting environmental data in whole Kosovo. Also, it aims at raising the students’ awareness and introducing them to the existing citizen science community of FLOSSK.
We have involved students and mentoring teachers from six schools to build sensor stations for measuring environmental data about weather and air quality. This component has taught team building, project management, and working with electronics. This work has been done in different cities in Kosovo, such as Prishtinë, Vushtrri, Lipjan, Prizren, Suharekë, and Rahovec.
The resulting stations were placed at participating schools involving students’ site location choices and how pollution around schools will affect the readings. The stations built will produce relatively good quality open data that will be fed into open data platforms online to be used in the second component of the project and by the general public for information and further study.
We will use citizen science and the students from the six schools involved to raise awareness about the trends in their community, specific sources of pollution, weather patterns as well as making them more aware of the effects on the environment and impact of pollution. This component will teach the youth involved to learn about data, derive trends, and techniques for analysis and correlation with other factors, and using the data to effectively tell stories that can be used for policy lobbying.