Collaborative Online Activities for Acoustics Education and Psychoacoustic Data Collection

Online collaborative game-based activities may offer a compelling tool for mathematics and science education, particularly for younger students in grades K-12. We have created two prototype activities that allow students to explore aspects of different sound and acoustics concepts: the ldquococktail party problemrdquo (sound source identification within mixtures) and the physics of musical instruments. These activities are also inspired by recent work using games to collect labeling data for difficult computational problems from players through a fun and engaging activity. Thus, in addition to their objectives as learning activities, our games facilitate the collection of data on the perception of audio and music, with a range of parameter variation that is difficult to achieve for large subject populations using traditional methods. Our activities have been incorporated into a pilot study with a middle school classroom to demonstrate the potential benefits of this platform.