Engaged Student Learning through IoT-based Capstone Projects: Particular Look at Student Engagement in Historically Underrepresented Groups

The COVID-19 pandemic resulted in changes in learning methods and attitudes in the STEM fields. The pandemic forced institutions of higher education to explore remote teaching/learning systems and tools some of which remain in use today. Such remote teaching/learning systems and tools present challenges for most STEM fields that involve hands-on experiences through laboratory or workshop environments that require access to devices, instruments and/or equipment. The engaged student learning through IoT project was introduced as a means to enable students to perform hands-on learning activities in their own time and space with minimal need for and dependence on university laboratory resources. In this paper, we describe engaged student learning through problem- and project-based learning (PBL) in IoT-based projects in senior capstone design courses at two Hispanic-Serving Institutions. Particular attention is paid to engagement and learning of historically under-represented student groups in capstone teams. Students in multidisciplinary teams borrowed IoT devices for the duration of their course work to discover and learn on their own with instructor guidance and developed course materials. The evaluation of the student performance and feedback indicate that students have benefited from access to IoT devices outside the laboratory environments by developing creative solutions to the undertaken capstone projects as well as problem-solving skills that are expected in the workforce. In this statistically small student sample size, there were no notable differences observed in the success of historically underrepresented students vs. all other students in the IoT-based projects in terms of engaged student learning. The IoT devices enabled the teams to undertake multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary projects that involved mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, mechanical engineering technology, and computer science students, each contributing to different objectives of the project to achieve the overall goal.