CO2 Monitoring –
First Community Science Project Kicks Off

Quest has launched its first community science project called Expedition CO2 – engaging students, educators and scientists in a real-world learning and data gathering journey.

Quest is reaching out to schools in the Tri-Valley to participate. So far, students from San Ramon Valley High and the Athenian School have begun working with Quest mentors and climate scientists to design and build a low-cost CO2 sensor that with a little instruction anybody can make and operate at home. Sensors will be capable of reporting locally measured CO2 levels through the internet to a “Quest Lab Notebook” so we can see experimental results across the entire Tri-Valley Region. Initial community science measurements will be focused on evaluating sensor performance and on the study of human and plant respiration.

Quest will expand this project’s reach to girls from low income families by conducting a workshop in February at the 2020 Tri-Valley Expanding Your Horizons conference sponsored by Lawrence Livermore and Sandia National Laboratories. The event aims to excite, educate, equip, and empower participants to achieve economic mobility and better life chances through STEM learning experiences. Volunteers from Dublin High School are slated to help run Quest experiments at the event in February. The experiments will help attendees see how human and plant respiration affect CO2 concentrations in the air. During the workshop attendees also will be guided through assembly of the sensor module to learn about microprocessors and then use their sensors for hands on experimentation.