Students’ behaviour analysis based on correlating thermal comfort and spatial simulations; case study of a schoolyard in Shiraz City

Abstract

The significant impact of outdoor school environments on student behaviour highlights the need to study how students interact with their surroundings. This has become a central focus in recent educational research, leading scholars to use various methods to gain insight into student movement behaviour. This research introduces a novel data-driven spatial gridding technique, employing thermal comfort and space syntax evaluation through ENVI-met and depthMapX software. It validates the extracted climatic and spatial heatmaps using real-time drone footage and Python programming to map and visualize student movement patterns. The findings from the Pearson correlation analysis in the Orange Software suggest that the correlated spatial-thermal heatmap better represents students’ actual behaviour with a high correlation coefficient of 0.84 (p = 0.84). Furthermore, this study sheds light on how students’ dynamic and static behaviours are linked to the schoolyard’s thermal and spatial characteristics. In conclusion, this research innovatively combines real-time monitoring with dual-simulations to analyze student movement behaviour, providing valuable insights into specific schoolyard dynamics.

KEYWORDS:

• Schoolyard
• behavior analysis
• thermal comfort simulation
• space syntax
• video processing
• data correlation

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the following individuals for their contributions to this project: Mr. Tavakolbakhoda for his assistance in collecting data on students and buildings; and Ms. Masnadi, staff of Daneshgah School, for providing us with valuable information about the school's characteristics; and Mr. Ali Saeian for his assistance in operating the mobile weather station and collecting climatic data, and We would also like to cordially thank Mohammad Safavi for his great help and assistance in drone aviation and aerial videography.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Ethical statement

(1) This material is the authors’ own original work, which has not been previously published elsewhere. (2) The paper is not currently being considered for publication elsewhere. (3) The paper reflects the authors’ own research and analysis in a truthful and complete manner.

Consent to participate

The school principal and the council, as the key deciders, are provided with key information about the project they can consider before deciding whether to take part.

Consent to publication

all authors consent to the publication of the manuscript in Theoretical and Applied Climatology.

Code availability

Envi_met Science and Education license is licensed to ‘DEPARTMENT OF ARCHITECTURE.’

Author contributions

All authors contributed to the study's conception and design. Material preparation, data collection, and analysis were performed by KF, VB, FA, and MAH. The first draft of the manuscript was written by VB, and all authors commented on previous versions of the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

Data availability statement

The Shiraz meteorological weather data were purchased. The documents are available upon request. No other outsource datasets were used or applied. Moreover, the data generated during our current study for all students’ actual movement analysis, Space Syntax Modeling, and Climate Simulations are available and ready to be sent upon request.

Additional information

Funding

This research did not receive any specific grant from funding agencies in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.