A Tool for Facilitating the Teaching of Smart Home Applications

This article presents a new tool that can be used to improve the teaching methods of smart home systems development. The main contribution of this tool is that it allows stakeholders to develop home automation (HA) systems using platform-independent graphical elements. Teachers can use this tool to introduce the development of smart home applications and to demonstrate concepts and theories pertaining to this domain. In addition, students can use the tool as an autonomous-learning environment. From the students' point of view, the development of a new system starts with the use of a smart home-specific graphical language, instead of using platform-dependent tools. The article is not only concerned with the description of the tool but also with the methodology to be followed by teachers and students. An example of use is also included illustrating the usefulness of the tool in engineering education. In order to evaluate the benefits of the approach, we conducted a survey amongst students who used the tool. The analysis of the outcome of this survey shows the chance to enable the development of HA applications with improved usability quality factors. (c) 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Comput Appl Eng Educ 22: 178-186, 2014