Understanding the Internet of Things: Education and Experience

In this paper, we propose an well-organized lecture note for giving a better understanding on the Internet of Things (IoT) to people including non-computer majors without computing and communication knowledge. In recent years, the term 'IoT' has been popularized, and IoT will make a huge impact on our industries, societies, and environments. Although there are large amount of literature on presenting IoT from technological perspectives, few are published that are organized for teaching students having non-computer-related majors. Based on research and education experiences on IoT, we tried to make a lecture note focusing on the process of collecting data from everyday objects, transmitting and sharing data, and utilizing data to create new values for us. The proposed lecture note was employed in teaching a liberal arts class, and it was shown that students could have an understanding of what IoT really means and how IoT could change our world.