Apollon project: A massive online open lab for citizen science driven environmental monitoring

The collaborative power of ICT systems is a key enabler of social and technological advances disclosing multiple opportunities for involving students and teachers in STEM, thanks to novel paradigms like citizen science and mobile crowd sensing These paradigms, if applied according to specific methodologies, promise to increase the pervasiveness of current environmental monitoring technological solutions. In this paper, we propose an approach, for enabling universities and schools to develop environmental monitoring experiments based on massive online open labs and citizen science concepts. The approach has been implemented and validated in an educational context, where students participate to scientific research activities. In the paper, we firstly describe the approach to produce successful experiments, the supporting platform and the results achieved in a real context. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is discussed in terms of compliance with a set of reference guidelines addressing the citizen science domain.