Climate change and the need for sustainable development have become part of our daily lives. In this context, it is crucial to involve the educational community to the discussion, both students and teachers; by increasing awareness about these issues and the ways school communities can contribute to energy savings, we can kick-start a change towards more sustainable practices in our societies. The Green Awareness in Action (GAIA) H2020 research project implemented an IoT-based approach in several European schools for sustainability awareness and energy efficiency, while at the same time aiming for increasing students' digital skills. By using gamification, competitions and IoT-based educational activities, GAIA engaged directly with teachers and students in order to realize energy-saving activities in their environment. We report here on the use of gamification and competition among schools in this context, and how they helped together with IoT-based lab activities to engage students and educators to participate in the project more actively. We provide details on the implementation of GAIA's intervention in specific school settings to showcase our approach. Our findings, backed up by evaluation data and answers to a survey by 30 educators in Greece and Italy, confirm that the inclusion of competition and gamification aspects can significantly increase students' engagement, especially when having groups/schools competing with each other. Moreover, IoT-based educational activities can supplement existing educational activities in interesting ways, with students evaluating positively the experience and educators reporting increased overall student engagement in their class during the intervention period, and, on average, better class performance compared to previous periods.

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Raising awareness among young people, and especially students, on the relevance of behavior change for achieving energy savings is increasingly being considered as a key enabler towards long-term and cost-effective energy efficiency policies. However, the way to successfully apply educational interventions focused on such targets inside schools is still an open question. In this paper, we present our approach for enabling IoT-based energy savings and sustainability awareness lectures and promoting data-driven energy-saving behaviors focused on a high school audience. We present our experiences toward the successful application of sets of educational tools and software over a real-world Internet of Things (IoT) deployment. We discuss the use of gamification and competition as a very effective end-user engagement mechanism for school audiences. We also present the design of an IoT-based hands-on lab activity, integrated within a high school computer science curricula utilizing IoT devices and data produced inside the school building, along with the Node-RED platform. We describe the tools used, the organization of the educational activities and related goals. We report on the experience carried out in both directions in a high school in Italy and conclude by discussing the results in terms of achieved energy savings within an observation period.

Energy consumption reserves a large portion of the budget for school buildings. At the same time, the students that use such facilities are the adults of the years to come and thus, should they embrace energy-aware behaviors, then sustainable results with respect to energy efficiency are anticipated. GAIA is a research project targeting this user domain, proposing a set of applications that a) aims at raising awareness, prompting action and fostering engagement in energy efficiency enhancement, and b) is adaptable to the needs of each facility/community. This application set relies on an IoT sensing infrastructure, as well as on the use of humans as sensors to create situational awareness.