Living Walls: Choosing a Location with Arduino
An example of the final device design.Copyright 2021 Kadria Drake, University of Wyoming
Living walls or vertical gardens can elevate indoor spaces, improve aesthetics, and bring nature inside. But how do living walls after the surrounding environment? Is it possible that living walls can improve the atmosphere where they exist? In this activity, students use an Arduino Sensing Toolkit to monitor their environment. Students collect data on CO2, temperature, and relative humidity. They then apply this data to a real-world situation of adding a living wall to a specific location and justifying their answer with data.
Engineers help create designs for buildings that have comfort and health in mind. Engineers must think about the environmental quality of a building. This means understanding the thermal environmental conditions for human occupancy as well as the ventilation necessary for their specific building purpose. They must be able to make changes to their designs to better fit the purpose of the space and thermal comfort for those who will use the building. Engineers are always using data to support or adjust their original plans and ideas. This will give the students a chance to do this.
After this activity, students should be able to:
- Develop an Arduino sensing toolkit to gather data about their environment.
- Compare data gathered to national standards/expectations for indoor air quality.
- Construct an argument based on their data to support the location of a living wall to fix an issue that they see in their thermal comfort or indoor air quality.