The SAS project: Speech signal processing in high school education

We describe the Speech And Sound (SAS) outreach project with the aim of introducing high school students to speech signal processing through the real-life example of automatic speech recognition. The syllabus was designed to help students understand how the concepts they learn as part of the physics, mathematics and computing courses relate to reallife applications. The six week project was organized into a mixture of informal lecture and practical sessions and the students were encouraged to engage in informal discussions with the instructors with any questions and ideas. The project was piloted at an international high school in India with 10th, 11th and 12th grade students. By the end of the course, the students had gained a high level understanding of the many technologies that make up such a complex system, as evident by the high overall scores in the final assessment.