Challenges and Opportunities on Using Games to Support IoT Systems Teaching

TL;DR

This paper reviews how games can be used to teach IoT systems, highlighting challenges like hardware constraints and opportunities for more effective learning methods through a structured literature review.

Contribution

It presents a structured review identifying challenges and opportunities in teaching IoT systems with games, based on empirical studies.

Findings

Identified key challenges in IoT teaching, such as hardware constraints and system complexity.

Revealed opportunities for using games to improve IoT education.

Reviewed 12 relevant empirical studies.

Abstract

Context: New systems have emerged within the Industry 4.0 paradigm. These systems incorporate characteristics such as autonomy in decision making and acting in the context of IoT systems, continuous connectivity between devices and applications in cyber-physical systems, omnipresence properties in ubiquitous systems, among others. Thus, the engineering of these systems has changed, drastically affecting the manner of their construction process. In this context, to identify simple and playful alternatives to teach how to build them is a difficult task. Objective: To present how to teach IoT systems using games, to reveal challenges and opportunities obtained through a literature review. Method: A Structured Literature Review (StLR), supported by the Snowballing technique, was executed to find empirical studies related to teaching, games and IoT systems. Results: 12 papers were found about teaching IoT systems using games. As challenges and opportunities, many issues were identified related to IoT systems programming, modularity, hardware constraints, among others. Conclusion: In this work, research challenges and opportunities were found in the context of IoT systems teaching. Due to specific features of these systems, teaching their construction is a difficult activity to carry out.