Enabling MOOL in acoustics by mobile crowd-sensing paradigm

The availability of mobile devices anywhere and anytime allows us to experience new ways of teaching scientific disciplines. The opportunities disclosed by smartphones along with their rich outfit of embedded sensors can be exploited according to novel sensing paradigms, as the Mobile Crowd-Sensing (MCS). Moreover, the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) model promises a capillary diffusion of mobiles in schools, thanks to the extreme pervasiveness these devices have reached amongst youngsters. All these aspects can be leveraged to offer effective laboratorial educational experiences in science. In this paper, we propose a platform that adopts the two paradigms just mentioned for involving secondary schools' students in didactic experimentation about acoustics, which paves the way to the development of a Massive Open Online Laboratory (MOOL) in this scientific sector. The platform design and implementation choices, as well as the didactic experimentation are described throughout the paper.