Use of a smartphone measurement application to teach basics in buildings and environmental acoustics to schoolchildren and teachers

The teaching of acoustics notions with a young or heterogeneous audience in an educational framework can be faciltated by acoustic measurement practices through entertaining activities. NoiseCapture is a smartphone application dedicated to the evaluation of environmental noise and to the realization of collaborative noise maps based on voluntary measurements sharing. This paper briefly presents initial experiences of awareness and education initiatives related to environmental noise with middle school students based on NoiseCapture Partys within scientific events context. A few examples of interventions that go further than simple environmental noise assessment are also given. NoiseCapture relies on the GPS location to allow for the measurements geolocation and thus map representation of the noise environments. The application has been diverted from its first purpose within an educational context by proposing training courses to secondary school teachers and middle school students concerning basic concepts in buildings acoustics for the first audience, and introducing to both noise measurements and mapping for the second one. The paper gives first feedbacks from these training initiatives.