Personal Exposure Monitoring of the Air Pollutants as a K-12 Educational Tool

DESCRIPTION provided by applicant Personal Exposure Monitoring of Air Pollutants as an Educational Tool in the GO Treks project launched by the Phase I grant students at schools throughout the U S used personal monitors to measure the air pollutants black carbon and ozone along treks of their own design The treks were uploaded to blogs in the GO website where they were displayed on Google Earth and where students teachers GO staff and air quality scientists discussed the results The students learned about the sources transformations and sinks of air pollutants by acting as citizen scientists forming and testing their own hypotheses using real scientific instruments Highlights include comparisons of rural vs urban exposures discovery of increased pollution levels during pick up drop off traffic at schools comparisons of pollutant levels along busy and residential streets analysis of exposures during commutes to school a trek at a hydraulic fracturing site treks from urban areas into the mountains and investigation of emissions from different types of sources such as lawnmowers and buses One school explored an area that is known to have an underground coal mine fire and even launched the ozone monitor on a balloon to km ft where ozone in the stratosphere was measured We propose to improve upon and expand GO Treks in the Phase II project by implementing a quality assurance QA program for GO Treks data developing a universal Personal Air Monitoring Module PAMM that will allow any air quality sensor to upload data in real time to GO Treks via a smart phone app expanding the suite of miniaturized instruments available to GO Treks to include CO and Equivalent PM in addition to O and black carbon and revising the GO online curriculum to be smaller andquot bite sizedandquot modules each of which can be completing in an hour or less and awarding digital badges for completion of each module Individuals who earn all GO Air Quality digital badges including those awarded for participation in a trek and for achieving a prescribed level of activit on the GO network will be awarded a Mozilla Open Badge that can be included in their digital resume The commercialization plan expands GO Treks to include citizen monitoring by environmental advocates and local government agencies in addition to schools and proposes rental of instruments at a fee of only $ week A business model is proposed that provides exponential growth of the project by continuous reinvestment of all but of profit in new inventory Model results using reasonable assumptions show that in four years GO Treks could be grown to annual rentals of $ M with servicing of organizations from an inventory of instruments PUBLIC HEALTH RELEVANCE The GO Treks project allows citizen scientists including students hobbyists environmental advocates and local government officials to measure air pollutants such as ozone black carbon particulate matter PM and CO along treks in their local communities A Personal Air Monitoring Module PAMM will allow measurements made using any air quality sensor to be uploaded via a cell phone app for display on Google Earth within a public blog for data sharing and public discussion