The Internet of Things (IoT) vision has been harnessed to develop a motivational curriculum with the objective of accelerating learning in this transformational new field of computing. We have developed a curriculum based on the STMicroelectronics SensorTile IoT platform providing an affordable kit for every student along with open source, powerful development tools. The IoT curriculum focuses on the technology and the broad societal impact of IoT with instruction and hands-on development. The SensorTile IoT platform integrates the most important state of the art processor, sensor, and wireless network interfaces. Rapid immersion in C code development is designed to accelerate learning while developing an understanding of computing and IoT technology. This has proven successful in freshman-through-graduate courses and for all engineering disciplines. The capability to support large student course enrollment has been met by developing a set of rapid learning tutorials and system development reference designs. Large classes of students in their first university session and without prior computing experience have been entirely successful in hands-on project development missions. In addition to fundamental, sensing principles, signal processing, and event detection systems, the new IoT curriculum includes machine learning. This is based on the new EmbeddedML system, with complete autonomous neural network train-and-execution systems hosted entirely on the SensorTile. This presentation will describe and demonstrate the curriculum, SensorTile IoT platform, tutorial sequence, EmbeddedML, and the successful support of many large course sessions.
Developed by: Xu Zhang and William Kaiser, Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, University of California, Los Angeles; and Marco De Fazio and Giorgio Mariano, STMicroelectronics, Burlington, Mass.