Stimulating research projects through teaching a course on the internet of things

The concept of the Internet of Things (IoT) refers to an emerging paradigm in which objects (things), that are not necessarily intelligent or traditionally part of the Internet, become highly connected and integrated in the Internet. With the appropriate sensor platform and actuators, these objects become constituents of intelligent IoT devices that collect a massive amount of data from the surrounding environments. This data will be further analyzed, locally or by a resourceful cloud server, for an appropriate action to be taken by the actuator circuit connected to the IoT device. The IoT paradigm paved the way for an enormous number of applications and systems to be built. Diverse research fields contributed to the emergence of the IoT concept. From wireless sensor networks, to embedded systems, to mobile computing, and not ending with semantic search engines. In a previous work, we proposed guidelines on how to teach an introductory course on IoT for both undergraduate and graduate students. In this paper, we shed the light on how teaching such a course becomes an opportunity to establish the basis for promising research projects and activities. We elaborate on the experiences gained from teaching the Introduction to the Internet of Things course at the American University of Kuwait, Kuwait, and show how undergraduate students can effectively launch research projects by learning about IoT platforms. Through presenting two case studies, we aim at sharing the achievements of undergraduate students who managed to use their knowledge in IoT systems to produce interesting research work.