Motivating and Demystifying IoT Learning with Hackathons in a Maker Space, Low-code Development and Rapid Prototyping

The ACM Computing Curricula 2020 states that the Internet of Things (IoT) is a field in computing that currently lacks an officially endorsed curriculum. This means that it is not yet considered a fully established academic discipline with a widely accepted curriculum that has been recognized or approved by organizations like ACM or IEEE. Given the rapid evolution and interdisciplinary nature of IoT, it can be challenging to determine the most appropriate content to include or exclude in IoT courses. This paper presents an elective course designed to quickly introduce students from Computer Science and Information Systems to the world of IoT. The course focuses on learning application-level communication protocols, the basics of rapid hardware prototyping with Raspberry Pi, and a low-code development tool (Node-RED) to quickly develop IoT applications. For their course project, students worked in teams during a weekend hackathon to build a working prototype of an IoT device with a Raspberry Pi, sensors, and actuators. The hackathon took place in a maker space in the information technology innovation park of the region. The paper provides feedback from 29 students from the two cohorts that took the course, and the qualitative data analysis shows that this approach indeed lowered the barrier to computer science and information systems students having their first contact with IoT development.