Internet of Things Garage

Internet of Things Education

The following section has been extracted from the paper "Anna Forster, Jens Dede, Andreas Konsgen, Asanga Udugama, and Idrees Zaman. 2017. Teaching Interent of Things. GetMobile: Mobile Comp. and Comm. 20, 3 (January 2017), 24-28. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3036699.3036707".

Teaching the Internet of Things has become vital in engineering, but also very challenging. This is mainly due to the almost unbelievable variety of available systems, hardware and software components, and online resources. The main goal of university-level education is to teach long-lived principles and concepts, and not short-lived systems or tools. At the same time, students also need to know tools and systems in order to be successful in the international job market. This problem is particularly hard in the context of the Internet of Things, where technology experiences breathtaking developments every day, and state-of-the-art today is already outdated tomorrow.

This paper targets exactly this question: how to handle this variety and this very fast pace of development in a university-level course.

While we acknowledge the importance of above mentioned challenges, in this project, we aim to achieve a broader goal. Our objective is not only to focus on developing an university level course, but to develop an broader IoT training program that has a built-in modular structure which can be easily customized to accommodate different types of learners.

Our target segments of learners are:

We aim to answer followsing questions:

Team



Outcomes

Internet of Things Lab Book (Download)


Students are provided with a lab book that explains each practical sessions steps by step. This lab book guides students through a series of labs. Each lab has its objectives. It expected that students should be able to complete each lab session within two hours (most of the time much less). This booklet does assume that students have some amount of networking knowledge. Further, it is important to mention that IoT by nature is a broad subject. Therefore, we cannot teach all the topics in-depth in a few lab sessions. For example, Arduino programming use C/C++ programming languages. However, we do not expect students to be an expert on C/C++ to follow the lab session. However, if the students have some background, they will find some known concepts in action and feel comfortable. If the student has never seen C/C++ before, they will, of course, feel nervous and sometimes will feel lost.


Throughout the lab book, we have provided explanations and external link and references to reading material. Especially if the students do not understand specific programming tasks such as C/C++, it may worth reading those links. Further, these link will provide guidance for students to explore the universe of IoT by their own, beyond the labs we have provided here. Finally, we would like to emphasis that this is not a programming course. Therefore, we do not try to teach a particular programming language (though we try to provide as much links and references for students to develop their skills). It is up to the students to develop the gaps in their knowledge by referring to the links we provided.



Internet of Things Advanced Lab Book

This IOT Advanced Lab Book is primarily compiled to support the university courses on Internet of Things: Systems Design at postgraduate levels. It is designed to complement the IOT Lab Book. The IOT Lab Book primarily focuses on IoT systems development, combining microcontrollers, single-board computers and IoT cloud platforms. This Advanced Lab Book aims at data analytics, complex network design, and simulations.

First, we will introduce you to a very useful network simulation tool called CISCO Packet Tracer. It is a very comprehensive tool with a significant number of features and capabilities. In this advanced lab book, we will only touch the surface of this tool and introduce some of the most common features and how you could use the packet tracer tool to explore and learn more about networking in general and the Internet of Things. Please make sure to use these tutorials as a beginning and explore further using examples provided in the CISCO Packet Tracer tool itself.

Next, we will take you through a journey of IoT data science. Through a series of labs, we will introduce you to IoT data exploration using Python. Subsequently, we discuss conceptual and procedural elements of data cleaning and feature engineering tasks to detect anomalies in wind turbines using IoT sensor data. It is important to note that this is a very high-level sneak peek overview of the data science world in the context of IoT. Using a real-world example, these labs will give you sufficient background and conceptual knowledge to start exploring data science methods and techniques in detail by yourself. We do not try to teach a particular programming language or data science (though we try to provide links and references for students to develop their skills). It is up to the students to develop the gaps in their knowledge using the links.