Breath In, Breath Out: Does Breathing in Your Classroom Change the Quality of the Air?

Investigation Protocol

This investigations calls for CO₂ levels to be measured in one classroom twice a day—at the beginning of the school day and at the end of the school day—for a week.

Note 1: You will need to submit a total of 10 Report Forms (two for each school day).
Note 2: Optionally, you can measure the air temperature in the classroom when each of the CO₂ level measurements is made.

1. Download, print out and review the guidelines for the data collection (Breath In, Breath Out. Collecting Data ).
2. Get your equipment ready and take your measurements for 5 days. Keep records in the table from the Collecting Data file.
   Note: If you are using one of the probes that support direct data transfer to GlobalLab, you do not have to write down your CO2 measurements. Your data is stored at GlobalLab. Please refer to the Working with Probes section on the Support page.
3. Fill in and submit 10 Report Forms.
4. Go to the Findings page and explore the results obtained by other project participants. Use GlobalLab’s charting and graphing tools to view CO₂ levels at the different times.
   Do CO₂ levels change over the day? Over the week?
   Are there any correlations between CO₂ levels and air temperature?
5. Discuss your findings with other participants. 

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What does ppm means?
It means parts per million. In other words, ppm is a measure of how much of a substance is in a mixture. In our case, ppm means how many CO₂ molecules there are in a million molecules of air. For example, a CO₂ reading of 1000 ppm means there are one thousand CO₂ molecules in a million molecules of air. For reference, one ppm (one in a million) is like one inch in 16 miles or one second in 11.5 days.