Towards Application-Driven IoT Education

The increased popularity of Internet of Things (IoT) systems and platforms in various engineering and science fields has made training practitioners in IoT a necessity. At the same time, the active evolution of research on IoT has made available a wealth of educational resources like evaluation and development kits, web development frameworks, single-board microcontrollers and minicomputers, and hands-on books and courseware. The diversity of applications served by IoT from one side and the abundant educational resources from the other side raise questions on how best to train practitioners in IoT. In this paper, we introduce a new approach in designing and teaching a course on IoT: application-driven IoT education. The aim of this course design is to teach IoT through understanding a target application in depth. Rather than introducing IoT conceptually over several weeks before linking the theoretical concepts to an application, in an application-driven course the audience instead first learns a real-world application; then, students utilize the different components of an IoT platform (sensors, actuators, connectivity technologies, web interface, and cloud computing) to realize the application. To better demonstrate the concept, we use the application-driven approach to design a “smart home security and privacy” IoT course. This work is based on a combined experience of three years of teaching and researching IoT at both the American University of Kuwait and Johns Hopkins University.