IoT-based Building Automation and Energy Management

As part of a NSF-funded ITEST grant, the ETID Department at Texas A&M University is developing a STEM Teacher Education initiative that helps secondary education math and science teachers to better understand advanced technology concepts. This new initiative will be presented to a different groups of approximately twelve teachers each year for three consecutive summers to create a cadre of educators who are able to excite high school students and motivate them to choose engineering/technology career paths as they enter their undergraduate degree programs. This paper presents an overview of and results from the two-week workshop hosted during summer 2017. Included in this overview will be an outline of the building automation/energy management experiential learning that was undertaken and how IoT was integrated into this important technology discipline. Examples of edge devices, sensors, wireless communications, and IoT processes such as publishing, subscribing, and building sensor/actuator dashboards for IoT-based building monitoring and control systems will be provided. Evaluation data, teacher feedback and anecdotal information will also be presented. In addition to plans for upcoming summer activities, the paper will summarize the industrial support received for this initiative and how undergraduate students assisted in the development and presentation of a portion of the technical content and laboratory exercises. Introduction There is a national desire in the United States to promote interest among students in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM). The idea being that this increased interest will translate into STEM college majors and subsequently produce the STEM professionals that the US needs. Promoting this interest is difficult in general, but this is particularly true with respect to the areas of engineering and technology. Many teachers may have an understanding of math and science, but few have extensive experience in engineering or technology. Promoting interest in engineering and technology requires a two-pronged approach: providing the necessary background for the teachers and developing interesting and compelling content for them to deliver to their students. As part of a project funded by the National Science Foundation, a two-week summer professional development workshop introduced a group of 12 junior high and high school teachers to various aspects of engineering and technology. The workshop was focused on the development of activities around building automation using two exciting technologies: connected devices (often referred to as the Internet of Things – IoT) and additive manufacturing (known as 3D printing). The workshop provided the first of the two “prongs” of the approach; it provided background for the teachers about various aspects of the engineering design process and the two technologies that would be used in the developed activities. To provide background for the 3D printing, teachers were introduced to computer-aided design (CAD) and taught how to create basic CAD models using Autodesk Fusion 360. The introduction to IoT entailed teaching them about various aspects of how connected devices work, the hardware, communications protocols, and programming. The second prong of the approach entailed creating compelling and interesting activities for the students. The first part of this was to use two widely talked about and emerging technologies (IoT and 3D printing). The second part was to create activities that were authentic and provided an opportunity for experiential learning. Experiential learning attempts to rectify what Kolb characterized as the “rejection” of the “real-world” by the educational establishment . Namely, experiential learning allows students to experience, reflect, think, and act as part of a holistic educational experience . Because the experiential learning model is based on a frame of the successive cycles between concrete and abstract concepts, a transfer from a theoretical lecture to the experiential activity or vice versa is claimed to be the sequential cycle for learning 1, . The students will be given the opportunity to use connected devices to collect data and learn about their school “environment”. This can be coupled with math and science activities (e.g., graphing, hypothesis testing) to improve student understanding and interest. Authentic activities are those which address some actual need or purpose outside of educational activities . The use of building automation as a platform for using these exciting new technologies contributes to the authenticity of the exercises. The focus of this work is on the technical aspects of the IoT instruction provided to the teachers. For several years now, both policy makers and industry across the United States have recognized the need for an increased emphasis on science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) in the public education system. One of the main reasons for this is to help young minds develop an interest and desire to learn math and science early in their education. In this way, they are better positioned to consider and pursue STEM related careers after high school. To this end, agencies such as the National Science Foundation and others have developed funding programs focused on the development of methodologies and curricula that can support the introduction of STEM in the current K-12 educational system. As a result, public educational systems and institutions of higher learning are responding. As an example, the State of Texas has developed a set of STEM academies (T-STEM) devoted to introducing STEM as part of the secondary curriculum and increase students’ college readiness for entering college-level STEM programs of study. As of 2013, 65 separate T-STEM Academies have been created and are operating. However, common problem that many of these programs encounter is how to introduce STEM into existing junior-high and high school curricula. This is a problem that several faculty members in the Department of Engineering Technology and Industrial Distribution (ETID) at Texas A&M are interested in solving. The ETID Department is one of fourteen departments in the College of Engineering. ETID is unique in that it is primarily an undergraduate department supporting four separate academic programs and over 1700 undergraduate students. As such the faculty have a strong focus on undergraduate teaching in addition to the requirements of performing scholarly research, disseminating knowledge, and engaging in service activities. Not surprisingly, it is this focus that drives many faculty to develop education-centered research projects and engage in education-related service including STEM outreach to K-12 teachers and students. Examples of these activities include: Beginning approximately eight years ago, faculty in the Electronic Systems Engineering Technology program developed a mobile robotic kit that could be used with junior-high and high school students to teach them about robotics, embedded hardware/software, and autonomous control. This kit has since been used by faculty to deliver multiple STEM summer camps on the Texas A&M campus, short courses at regional junior-high and high schools and teacher workshops. Faculty in Industrial Distribution and Manufacturing and Mechanical Engineering Technology are part an NSF-funded multidisciplinary project to introduce a selfsustaining manufacturing and distribution program to students living in communities in South Texas. Faculty in Electronic Systems Engineering Technology have collaborated with NASA to develop and support and embedded monitoring and control system that allows high school students to easily develop space-based experiments that can be delivered to and run on the International Space Station. A faculty member in Industrial Distribution brought the First Lego League to the region and runs the annual competition which involves hundreds of K-12 students in STEM activities and competitions. Faculty in Industrial Distribution and Manufacturing and Mechanical Engineering Technology received a National Science Foundation (NSF) Advanced Technological Education (ATE) grant for their collaborative research in providing an adaptive learning environment for high school and community college students who are interested in acquiring high value manufacturing skills. Most currently, multiple faculty across several of the programs have leveraged their past efforts, industry connections, technical research, and experience in STEM to create a proposal to the NSF’s ITEST program. The goal of the proposal is to pursue research that leverages industry members, K-12 teachers, and actual engineering focus areas that are of general interest to young minds to create educational experiences for junior-high and high school students that excite their interest in STEM concepts and motivates them to pursue higher education and/or careers in STEM related fields. ITEST Overview Because of the multidisciplinary composition of ETID, active faculty research in the areas of Internet of Things (IoT)/ building automation/additive manufacturing, and faculty expertise in STEM educational research, multiple members of the faculty submitted a proposal to the NSF ITEST program titled “Connected STEM Promoting STEM Education through Connected Devices and Building Automation.” The concept of the proposal is to use building automation and energy efficiency as a platform to develop fourth through twelfth grade students’ interest in pursuing post-secondary schooling and/or occupations in STEM related disciplines. Building automation and energy efficiency were chosen as the focus areas due to their popularity and ubiquity. Students are well aware of building automation since these concepts are used in their homes, schools and other buildings they frequent. In addition, energy efficiency is a topic of general interest to youth, especially due to the current con