Practical Education in IoT through Collaborative Work on Open-Source Projects with Industry and Entrepreneurial Organizations

This Innovative Practice Full Paper is devoted to the practices in the software engineering education that involve industrial and entrepreneurial partners. The particular focus of the paper is on the preparation, conduction and evaluation of the master practical course in the Internet of Things (IoT) open-source middleware. The motivation for the course is to train software engineers and architects that are able to solve the practical IoT challenges. The course was prepared and conducted during the winter term 2017-2018 at the Technical University of Munich. This course was created as a joint effort of the Chair for Computer Architecture and Parallel Systems, the manufacturing workshop UnternehmerTUM MakerSpace, and the entrepreneurship center UnternehmerTUM associated with Technical University of Munich. 14 participants of the course from different countries have developed an open-source IoT middleware, namely IoT Platform, that enables the retrieval of the data from sensors, distributed data storing and streaming, and platform services automatic detection. The middleware also incorporates well-documented application program interface (API). Performance monitoring facilities prepared by the team of students enable the Platform testing under different load. The IoT Platform was developed based on the 3D-printer management use-case from UnternehmerTUM MakerSpace and was presented at the UnternehmerTUM event Tech Challenge in a pitch format. Main contributions of the paper are in three areas: the methodology and technique to organize, conduct and evaluate the practical course in IoT that involves industrial and entrepreneurial partners; the pointers at particular technologies, solutions, and interconnections thereof for the development of new practically-oriented IoT courses; open-source IoT middleware that could be used for teaching and research purposes.