Abstract:

The Internet of Things (IoT) technology highly extends the capabilities of approaches related to the well-known technology of “Internet of People”. Currently, the educational community, among many others, moves towards the acceptance and adoption of IoT in the real educational settings aiming at widening the learning variability space in multiple dimensions, e.g. in STEM-driven Computer Science (CS) education.

In this paper, we propose a multi-stage approach for introducing IoT into the STEM-driven CS curriculum. Our approach consists of four stages of IoT prototyping. Stage 1, “Development of Smart Learning Objects (SLO)”, comes from our previous works, where we describe a development of SLOs in detail. Here, a SLO stands for a part of IoT node and is considered as a previous knowledge of students.

In Stage 2, “Development of IoT node”, the structure of SLO is expanded by adding Bluetooth or/and WiFi modules for:
(i) communicating among nodes, and
(ii) data (retrieved from the IoT node) transferring purposes.

Therefore, this enables to increase the functionality capabilities of SLO due to added new modules.

In Stage 3, “Development of non-contextualized IoT application”, where students use the IoT nodes from Stage 2 and additionally they design:
(i) the communication among IoT nodes,
(ii) communication between IoT node and mobile phone, computer, or other smart devices.

Furthermore, students learn how to retrieve and collect data from IoT nodes and transfer them to processing units. In this stage, students develop the application-independent user interfaces for the communicating, data transferring and representing purposes.

Finally, in Stage 4, “Development of contextualized IoT application”, students solve the real world tasks by selecting the relevant IoT nodes previously developed in Stages 1-3. In Stage 4, students model:
(i) communication “node-node”, “node-smart device”,
(ii) data collecting and transferring mechanisms, and
(iii) design application-dependent user interface for the educational IoT prototype.

The proposed approach ensures the possibilities to introduce IoT prototypes designing into STEM-driven CS education at the secondary school in a systematic way. We support this contribution with a case study using ARDUINO microcontroller, different sensors and Bluetooth modules for the IoT prototype designing and testing.

Keywords:

Internet of Things, STEM, Computer Science education, IoT node, smart learning object, IoT prototype.