Merging science education, citizen science and general population noise exposure data collection in the battle against noise pollution

Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics in education is commonly referred to as STEM. The last decades illustrate that our society is transferring into an ever accelerating technological environment. In parallel, the general public became an important driving force in collecting citizen science data to trigger legislative pressure and impact on policy makers to accelerate the improvement of their quality of life. That practice is currently extending into the environmental impact of noise related quality of life. This publication suggests to merge those educational STEM goals, citizen science monitoring and the need for population based noise monitoring data for efficient policy support. The presented educational project can be regarded as a proof-of-concept and can be repeated in different schools and classes every year. This approach has the potential to acquire abundant noise monitoring data and provides an unbiased population sampling dataset by design. This population driven involvement allows to assess real-life and long-term noise policy impact and could become a fundamental pillar in achieving the overall societal goal of improving noise related environmental quality of life.