The Crescent Lab: A smart home lab for students

Abstract

Active learning comes from experiencing phenomena; computing and computer technology requires a place for these experiences to occur. A "Smart Home" is a type of intelligent environment that can provide such a place for this experiential learning. Smart Homes continue to entice us with their promise of anticipating and meeting our needs as they unobtrusively adapt to our changing preferences and goals. The delivery of this promise, however, has met with limited success in terms of functionality and user acceptance. Many commercial and academic efforts are in progress to create true smart home systems. Taking these premises into consideration, students should have lab experiences that relate to both commercial technology as well as state-of-the-art research in computer science. The TCU Crescent Smart Home Lab has been defined to fill this need