The AYO! project for air quality monitoring

The school dropout is a not negligible phenomenon that, if not effectively contrasted, puts at risk the future of young people and expose them to greater risks of unemployement, poverty and social exclusion compared to peers with a good instruction level. In this paper we present AYO!, an extracurricolar laboratory aimed to contrast the high school dropout. AYO! is an acronym that means Assemble Your Objects, and it was choosen, in addition to literal meaning, for the assonance with the dialectal Sardinian's expression Ajo!, which is an exhortation that can be translated into english in “come on!” or “get a move on!”. AYO! allows engagement of students in design, realization and use of sensors and actuators systems with the aim of monitoring and analyzing the ambient around them. The practical activities have allowed to provide knowledge about very interesting topics for labour market and to develop awareness of how technological innovation can be used to understand the phenomena that surround them (eg. pollution, energy consumption, etc.). Specifically, the laboratory focuses on the paradigm of the Internet of Things which constitutes a key topic from the point of view of today scientific research and business strategies.