The internet of things in undergraduate computer and information science education: exploring curricula and pedagogy

Abstract

As the Internet of Things (IoT) continues its expansion into homes, businesses, government, and industries, the impact for computer science educators is amplified. In 2017, the ITiCSE IoT working group identified relevant content, tools for teaching, and four IoT course types. The resulting report provided an entry point for educators challenged with setting up a new IoT course, but did not consider the curricular content of a standalone specialization nor effective teaching approaches for this interdisciplinary field. In this report, the 2018 working group builds on its prior work through an updated review of literature and interviews with IoT instructors. The report addresses two research questions. First, what should a curriculum intended to produce IoT specialists include? We propose here a transdisciplinary curriculum that integrates threads from several disciplines on a single campus and we relate it to the ACM/IEEE 2013 Computing Curricula Knowledge Areas. Second, what pedagogical practices should be used to teach IoT? We found very little scholarship describing actual teaching practices, but our interviewees described their approaches and challenges in teaching. We present these as well as descriptions of several relevant teaching approaches in the report.