A Real-time Distributed Toolkit to Ease Children's Exploration of IoT

Children are increasingly exposed to everyday objects with embedded computing and wireless capabilities. However, understanding how these devices collect data, communicate information to other devices, and interpret program instructions is not typically taught to children. Moreover, programming these devices still requires considerable knowledge particularly for primary school children. In this paper, we showcase a distributed toolkit of various sensors and output modules, each with wireless capability, that can independently or in concert work together. This is enabled by a programming environment with a real-time interpreter that can connect and update the state of the modules on-the-fly. We tested the system with 32 primary school children in an after-school study and found that the majority of children knew how to couple sensors to different output modalities to solve various devised scenarios. For some children, the toolkit was also used to build IoT games or fulfill personal tasks.