This 7-week course will iteratively introduce students to connected products, as follows. The first 5-weeks will offer a bootcamp on considering and developing for the internet of things. The final 2 weeks will offer an opportunity for students to apply this learning in a collaborative group project.
Each week will offer:
Concepts: an introduction to concepts and considerations surrounding the Internet of things through readings, lectures, and in-class discussion
Skills: self-paced labs will develop students skills in preparing connected products and cover hardware, software, electronics and other lab skills.
Applied Critique: Concepts and Skills will be applied in short and focused weekly projects which will then be critically examined through group critique.
Students will complete a weekly creative exercise to develop conceptual understanding, refine and acquire skills and receive feedback on their ideas. Students will also be expected to complete an annotated bibliography of the readings assigned during the semester to demonstrate their review and understanding.
For the final two weeks, small teams will work together to identify a prospective idea for a connected product of the future, prepare a working prototype and deliver supporting process and outcome documentation.
For the outcome Students will prepare:
working demonstration of their idea (a prototype)
a functional specification (engineering) including circuit diagrams, etc.
a design from low-fidelity sketches to high-fidelity prototype
a high-level strategic documents outlining the costs involved, expected retail price, and draft promotional material.
Upon completion of this course a student should:
Reading Reflections - Weekly readings will be assigned and can be found on the readings page. Students will complete a short summary for each reading and share it on Canvas
Discoveries - Students will be asked to share a series of discoveries (example projects, code samples, articles, libraries, approaches, etc) that will benefit the group. Students will prepare at least 5 discoveries over the course of the semester.
Skills Development Exercises - During the first 5 weeks, students will complete a weekly technical exercises that put into practice content from instructor tutorials. These assignments will require them to experiment with code and circuits to program lightweight IoT solutions relating to the material introduced in class that week.
Weekly Creative Projects - Students will complete four weekly projects. One will be independent and three collaborative. These will involve applying skills introduces in the labs in combination with concepts introduced in the class to develop a working prototype or intervention. The prototype should be accompanied by clear documentation; to include technical implementation (code, design files, circuit diageams, video), need, strategy and use case (explanation, rationale for solution, concept video).
Final Project - Students will collaboratively explore a design scenario and envision an IoT ecosystem where multiple connected devices interact with one another. Students will conduct research, prepare prototypes and document their work.
Oral Presentation and Demonstration - Outcomes of the final project will be presented and demonstrated to invited guests in lieu of a final exam.