Transferring Research on IoT Applications for Smart Buildings into Engineering Education

The research project DigiLab4U 1 focusses on providing hands-on education scenarios for the Internet-of-Things generation [1]. IoT addresses several business domains, such as production (e.g. Industry 4.0), logistics and healthcare. The educational requirements for these domains have already been discussed in research. However, there has been little research on educational concepts and laboratory learning environments for smart buildings and their IoT-related technologies. This raises the question of how current research in the field of smart buildings at the Hochschule für Technik Stuttgart can be meaningfully interlinked with teaching and learning settings in the engineering education and how these topics can be provided in DigiLab4U. This paper presents an exemplarily research-based learning approach for integrating ongoing academic research into teaching and learning settings at a university of applied sciences. It focusses on educational requirements for a possible laboratory environment to be used in higher education.