University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Transforming IoT education: Pedagogy enhanced by harnessing virtualization, simulation and gamification technologies

Chang, Yu-Ju

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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/124612

Description

Title
Transforming IoT education: Pedagogy enhanced by harnessing virtualization, simulation and gamification technologies
Author(s)
Chang, Yu-Ju
Issue Date
2024-05-03
Director of Research (if dissertation) or Advisor (if thesis)
Caesar, Matthew
Department of Study
Electrical & Computer Eng
Discipline
Electrical & Computer Engr
Degree Granting Institution
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Degree Name
M.S.
Degree Level
Thesis
Keyword(s)
  • Internet of Things (IoT)
  • Pedagogy
  • Education
  • Simulation
  • Virtualization
  • Gamification
  • Flipped Classroom
  • Project-based
  • Collaborative Learning
  • Visualization
Abstract
In the field of computer science, the Internet of Things (IoT) sector has since been growing larger, and what comes along with that is the demand for better ways to teach students IoT. Educators are constantly finding methods to replace or enhance the traditional curriculum: project-based, flip classrooms, virtual labs, code-along, or game-based learning. Different techniques must be tailored to each subfield of computer science because of the unique challenges they each pose in education. This thesis focuses on addressing the following question: Can we create an innovative way to reduce learning barriers in the area of IoT and, at the same time, not sacrifice learning effectiveness? To achieve this goal, we designed a pedagogical approach to IoT education that combined educational strategies with engineering techniques to create an efficient IoT curriculum that could be easily adopted in different classroom settings. For our engineering effort, we designed and implemented the ITP (IoT Teaching Platform). The technology allows the students to perform hands-on IoT labs solely on their desktop or laptop computers. To analyze the teaching effectiveness of the platform, we deployed the system to 624 college students and 303 high school students. We recorded their interactions with the platform along with their test scores. The combined data gave us a better idea of how the students benefit from using the platform than the test scores alone. The results show that 66.25% of the students achieved over 5% score improvements. The most performed action for the web circuit builder is the Edit Code, accounting for 30.4% of all the web actions. For the Unity World, the users performed walking movements the most, representing 26% of the overall Unity actions. Of all the 37 types of user actions, 31 of them have a positive correlation with the student’s scores. The findings indicate that our curriculum is effective in improving students’ performance, and the number of interactions students had with the platform positively correlated with students’ grades. Our proposed educational approach proved effective in positively affecting students’ IoT learning outcomes by providing a well-designed curriculum and innovative technologies that help students interact easily with IoT components and remove the learning barriers they face.
Graduation Semester
2024-05
Type of Resource
Thesis
Copyright and License Information
Copyright 2024 Yu-Ju Chang

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