Engaging First-Year Engineering Students with Deep Learning and IoT

A recent survey by the American Society of Engineering Education Corporate Member Council highlighted two areas in which engineering graduates are inadequately prepared to meet industry demands: AI and Internet of Things (IoT). At the Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering at Arizona State University, we’re taking steps to address this skills gap by introducing engineering students to AI and IoT concepts early in their college careers. Specifically, a new learning module was added to the first-year Introduction to Engineering course in which students complete hands-on AI and IoT exercises using MATLAB^®. In these exercises, students perform image classification with a deep learning network and then send the results of their classifications to the ThingSpeak IoT analytics platform for aggregation and analysis. The module requires no previous programming experience in MATLAB and no additional hardware—students use their own laptops, tablets, and webcams. Just as importantly, the module requires minimal instructor preparation because the exercises were designed, implemented, and validated by MathWorks engineers and are ready to use in the course.