Using Mobile Crowd Sensing to teach technology and entrepreneurship in high schools: An experience from Southern Italy

Abstract

The need to shift from traditional teaching perspective to novel learning paradigms, mobile computing and experiential coursework is nowadays so relevant that both educators, curriculum designers and institutions must cope with these innovations, by progressively absorbing them into their programs. In such a scenario, we firmly believe that the actual pervasivity of mobile devices amongst learners can be exploited profitably to enrich and diversify didactic offerings, as well as the ways students participate and learn. More specifically, we identified the so-called Mobile Crowd-Sensing (MCS) paradigm as a viable candidate to introduce students from high schools to pivotal topics in engineering, Information Technology (IT) and entrepreneurship. Indeed, according to this paradigm, numerous physical quantities can be measured directly via mobile-embedded sensors (e.g., accelerometers, microphones, gyroscopes), thus increasing the contextual awareness of their owners without requiring expensive measurement equipment. In this paper, we propose our experience in Southern Italy by describing a project for introducing MCS into pilot schools and local communities. Achievable pedagogical advantages, enabling technologies, institution involvement and expected field trials are examined in details as well.