Abstract:

This article describes the experience of including a series IoT workshop in the subject “Seminario de Lenguajes opción C” of the Facultad de Informática ((Computer Science Faculty) of the National University of La Plata (UNLP) and your impact in the development of innovation project whit students from another subject, “Tecnologías Aplicadas a Business Intelligence” (TABI). The goal of this project was develop a Faculty’s library solution, for librarian and students, to improve your production. The project was presented at the Science and Technology Expo of the Faculty. The Science Expo is a proposal to share with the community, in a particular way with the students of the last year of secondary school, research, development and innovation works carried out by students and teacher-researchers.

The goal of these workshops was to motivate students in learning the process, showing that the C programming language is still current with new technologies. Also, the tools worked in the TABI subject was using in a specific and innovation application with real users.

The use of open source technology stands out, both for the Arduino programming IDE as well as InfluxDB and Grafana , both products implemented in their Community versions.

The portal provides access to different boards for librarians and students. Each board show the data collected by Arduino sensors connected to the Internet through a NodeMCU board. Graphics and tables in different formats and groupings, visualize the data in real time. The data is stored in an InfluxDB database and visualized through dashboards built in Grafana.

The integration with the MiUNLP , UNLP’s mobile application, allowed the integration of the entire solution whit anothers UNLP applications for students and visualize, in real time and in the cell phone, the degree of occupation of the library.

Students could learn and go deep into their knowledge with new technologies, very present in the current market, such as projects related to the Internet of Things. They also worked in groups, between advanced students of the career with students of the first years. Both groups were trained in the different topics, in sensors and in Influx, Grafana and project monitoring tools such as Trello , Git and Slack.

The proposed architecture allow extend the project in the future, through the use of APIs for interconnection with other systems and the incorporation of different types of sensors. These projects, in pandemic conditions, constitute a very useful tool for managing shared spaces.

Keywords:

IoT, C, Arduino, motivation, programming learning, data analytics.