Week 1: Block Programming for the Internet of Things

The project I will be involved in is Block Programming for the Internet of Things. The student participants, Andriana Burgess, Keenah Mays and I, Cynthia Jules, will be participating in this project with our faculty advisor, Gedare Bloom, Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Howard University.

In this project we will "explore the effectiveness of using block programming to introduce and excite students to create IoT applications" (Bloom, pg. 1). It has been observed that block programming at various level has been successful, so we intend to use Ardublock to make the initial frontend of our interface. We want to combine the block programming with embedded systems to teach introductory programming at the college level. The tasks of this research project are as follows:

1. To design and prototype a block programming for networked embedded system development;

2. To create and end-to-end IoT application relying on public cloud services and using programming for both the embedded system and smartphone app;

3. To design experiments for hypothesis testing to validate the effectiveness of block programming.

The rise of the IoT has increased the need for competent programmers and we believe they can be achieved through block programming. Block Programming offers a graphical interface that allows the user to visualize the program execution, which also engages students more than programming in the standard IDE. They get the chance to learn programming without the issues with the language and syntax.

Hypothesis 1 states that "Students perceive no difference in the authenticity of block programming versus traditional development environments for embedded systems." (Bloom, pg. 2). This is because embedded systems give students the real-world experience, so to test this hypothesis we will conduct surveys to compare experiences with block programming environments to IDEs.

The difference between our project and previous attempts at engaging students in block programming is that we are introducing these concepts in the computer organization course after students have already taken basic programming courses. The embedded systems help contextualize the lessons and block programming help students learn embedded systems development incrementally.

Hypothesis 2 states that "Students perceive that the open-ended term project using an embedded system helps their learning" (Bloom, pg. 3). In the survey students will gauge how the final project was helped their learning.

Our research method will include embedded systems like a BeagleBone Black (BBB) with breadboards, temperature and light sensors to show input processing. It will also include cloud platform that will have an AT&T M2X system and the user app will be made using AppInventor to communicated with the M2X. We will begin with the Eclipse-based Ardublock platform. The participants of this project will have several questions to consider and answer throughout the duration of this project.

Our next steps will be "Task 1: Block UI Prototyping" where we will design and prototype a block programming interface for the embedded system development with the BeagleBone Black. In September we will adopt an existing block programming language (Ardublock) to IoT systems by identifying the required programming constructs. And also begin writing Ardublock front-end code.

Each student will have to work 12 hours a week on this project and that includes a twice weekly 30 minute meetings where we will present status reports . Also we will be involved with one hour weekly training sessions on conducting research and attending guest lectures. We will present our research individually during one of these meetings during the second semester. Our remaining 6 hours will be spent working together in the Embedded Systems Security Lab. We have been tasked with keeping a weekly blog on our status, findings, research and literature.

So we being our research as of today.

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