Air Quality in Scotland’s interactive websites
The link below will take you directly to the Air Quality in Scotland’s education web page. This web page provides a link to two air quality resources aimed at school pupils. These are briefly described below:
The ‘Air Pollution Detectives’ website is designed to accommodate active learning in primary school pupils. The pupils are lead through a series of informative pages detailing contaminants, their sources and how we can help to reduce them. The clouds at the top right can be used to navigate through the website and link you to ‘Home’, ‘Suspects’ (pollutants), ‘Crime Scene’ (sources), ‘How does it affect me?’ (impacts), ‘What can I do’? and ‘Climate Change’. This web page is interactive and requires pupils to click on images to reveal answers and also provides quizzes to enhance learning.
The ‘Clean the Air’ website can also be accessed by the link below and this produces an informative resource for young teenagers. By using the tabs at the top of the page pupils can learn about the types of pollutants, their health implications, monitoring strategies, and how we can mitigate these impacts. The web page also provides interactive tools where pupils can investigate the air quality status at their home or school and calculate their own transport emissions.
The Air Quality in Scotland website also provides a detailed air quality interactive map. This map provides the location of pollutant data set readings across Scotland. By selecting one of these points more information can be accessed by clicking ‘View full site data and information’. Once selected, pollutant type and quantity data will be displayed in a table. By using the blue tabs above, pupils may access the selected data in infographic form, compare the data with average statistics, or display the site information and pictures.
These links could be useful in supporting a geography lesson. The interactive map displays how urban areas generally have higher air pollution levels than in rural areas. Pupils could be asked to investigate why one area has a higher pollution level than another. Pupils can use the site information section provided on the map along with other resources such as google maps and google search. The questions pupils could ask themselves to produce an answer could be: Where is the nearest road? What is the traffic like? What is the topography