Designing a Project for Learning Industry 4.0 by Applying IoT to Urban Garden

The fast evolution of technologies forces teachers to trade content off for self-learning. Project-based learning (PBL) is one of the best ways to promote self-learning and simultaneously boost motivation. In this paper, we present our experience of designing a PBL course for industrial informatics. We provide all the designing details that could help other teachers to reproduce a similar experience. Furthermore, we report on the impact that this project has on student satisfaction and motivation. The new industry 4.0 topic allows us to carry out complete projects, integrating different technologies and tools. Moreover, the selection of open-source and standard free technologies makes easy and cheap the access to hardware and software platforms used. Surveys taught us that tuning the courses toward developing real projects on the field, has a large impact on acceptance, learning objectives achievements, and motivation toward the course content.