Educational Living Labs: A Novel Internet-of-Things Based Approach to Teaching and Research

This paper explores some a novel approaches to harnessing the Internet-of-Things (IoT) as a teaching and research vehicle in education. For teaching we argue that the Internet-of-Things provides a highly motivating topic to capture students' imaginations, and a perfect platform for teaching computer science. In addition, we explain the potential for entire campuses or buildings to be constructed from Internet-of-Things technologies and the potential for this infrastructure to act as a teaching platform. This proposition is perfectly captured by the axiom "The college building (or campus) is the lab". This philosophy is part of a wider movement that started in the EU, called Living Labs. In achieving these aims, our work seeks to combine a number of concepts, first we utilise the Internet-of-Things, second we incorporate Living Labs ideas, third we harness the iCampus vision, forth we use the 'Smart Box' concept and finally we implement the Pervasive-interactive-Programming (PiP) paradigm. We contend this approach can be used in various mixes to produce highly motivating and effective educational environments. We illustrate this work by describing the application of these ideas to a real-world venture, the Harlow UTC (in the UK). The main focus of this paper concerns the use of PiP, together with the Internet-of-Things, to teach elementary programming skills. In in support of this we present results of an evaluation of PiP with 18 participants (students and staff) of varied age and gender. The main conclusions of these evaluations were that PiP enabled students and staff, with diverse backgrounds, to quickly master the programming skills involved. The paper concludes by describing our future plans for this work.