Designing IoT applications in lower secondary schools

Abstract

The paper reports on a case study where four groups of lower secondary school students participated in a workshop and undertook the demanding role of designers of Internet of Things applications. In doing that, they made use of a dedicated inventor toolkit, which facilitated students' creative solutions to problems that can appear in the context of a smart city. From a pedagogical point of view, the workshop format is in line with the experiential learning approach. The paper presents a holistic student assessment methodology for this nice domain. In particular, to analyse the impact of the workshop for the students we used four different approaches: artefacts analysis of students' design solutions, classroom observations, a post-test and a survey. The results indicate that the intervention has promoted an effective teaching methodology for the basic conceptual and design aspects of the IoT for these lower secondary school students, but it hasn't addressed equally effectively the attitude-related aspects. Nonetheless, the participant students perceived the intervention as very satisfactory in terms of the IoT concept knowledge, smart cities learning, and problem-solving skills acquired, as well as in terms of enjoyment. The paper concludes on the learning gains of the intervention and discusses the motivation aspect for the teacher as well as for the students in this highly innovative learning experience.

STEM Learning and Career Orientation via IoT Hands-on Activities in Secondary Education

“…An educational scenario (ES) is the outcome of an instructional design process that aims at helping teachers to design and develop appropriate activities for learners, by providing all the necessary components a teacher needs, such as the learning objectives, the educational material, the educational activities, etc. Several ESs have been developed during the UMI-Sci-Ed project (e.g., see [4], [8]) by different research teams using inquiry based science education methods that exploit UMI technologies both as learning tools and learning objectives. ESs are used as templates to promote STEM oriented learning experiences following learnercentered approaches which may improve the perception of actively participating students regarding UMI technologies and lead them a vision of a related personal technical career.…”

“…Research efforts more closely related with our work include [4] where, a case study is considered over four groups of secondary school students acting as virtual IoT application designers, and [5] which incorporates an IoT-based learning framework into a software engineering embedded system analysis and design course. In a similar to [5] context, Byrne et al [6] explore the use of a constructivist 21 st century learning model by implementing a week-long workshop, delivered as a "hackathon" to encourage pre-university teenagers to pursue STEM oriented careers, with a particular emphasis on computer science.…”

Investigating Secondary Students’ Stance on IoT Driven Educational Activities

“…This work attempts to fill a gap in the literature, since the relevant research efforts focus more on just presenting UMI to students or on the programming or technical aspects of IoT and less in using UMI technologies as main learning tools to reinforce STEM education and to investigate the students' engagement in IoT learning activities. Notable exceptions include the work of Mavroudi at al [8], in which an analysis is conducted on a case study where four groups of lower secondary school students participated in a workshop and undertook the demanding role of designers of IoT applications and the case study presented in [6], that incorporates an IoT-based learning framework into a Software Engineering (SWE) embedded system analysis & design course. Both works focus on the learning gains of using IoT as a tool to design learning activities, evaluate the derived activities through survey questions and discuss the motivation aspect for teachers and students.…”

A Board Game and a Workshop for Co-creating Smart Nature Ecosystems

“…Participatory design or co-design more in general strive to enhance environments where people live by engaging them in designing or re-designing the environments themselves [14]. Although there are several participatory or codesign workshops with cards or other generative toolkits for designing smart or IoT objects with children, e.g., for enhancing cities [13] or for creating socioemotional bonds [7,8], there are fewer workshops for co-designing with children smart nature ecosystems. An exception is by Smart Toy LLC, which partnered with the National Wildlife Federation in USA to create a mobile gamified app and a companion smart toy that encourage USA children to connect with nature [10].…”