  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.
