Internet of Things (IoT) Enhanced Educational Toolkit for Teaching & Learning of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM)

Abstract

The advancement of the Internet of Things (IoT) fortifies intelligent system development for diverse information management in various domains. Information produced from Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) fields across the diverse networks, also can be successfully integrated to analyze virtually with the help of IoT. Thus, learning relative IoT technology has to be carried out to achieve the initiative's agenda. However, the current Teaching and Learning (T&L) systems are lacking in smart learning toolkit to equip the students with IoT-based STEM knowledge and skillsets relative to the IoT. The purpose of this study is to develop a smart toolkit in association with a T&L module to expose STEM knowledge to the students. The developed toolkit comprises an Input/output (I/O) test board to carry out both analog and digital data acquisition. Raspberry Pi is the heart of this toolkit that processes and transfers the acquired data to a cloud platform named ThingsSentral™ to structurally store, analyze and represent data graphically. Besides, a T&L module was designed based on this developed toolkit functionalities to expose STEM discipline to the younger generation. Based on the performance observations, the proposed system offers a cost-effective cloud-facilitated solution for the Project-Based Learning (PBL) approach, also exhibits salient suitability to effectively introduce IoT-based STEM knowledge to the students, non-technical personnel, even domain experts at the shortest possible time.