Internet of things to power classroom education

Businesses and academics have joined forces in an £800,000 project to extend the internet of things into the classroom

Businesses and academics have joined forces in an £800,000 project to extend the so-called internet of things into the classroom.

Through the programme, Distance, the consortium for furthering education through advanced technologies, aims to develop “the internet of school things” with eight UK schools.

The eight schools are Alder Grange Community, Technology School and Sixth Form School, East Barnet School, North Liverpool Academy, Writhlington School, Hayesfield Girls' School, The King’s School, The Bluecoat School, and Bury St Edmunds County Upper School.

Distance said it would be working with the schools in using emerging technology to help make learning more exciting while linking directly into the education curriculum.

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The consortium, which includes Intel, University of Birmingham’s Urban Climate Laboratory, the UCL Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, and The Open University Department of Computing, among others, will provide a platform and service layer to connect schools with third-party service and application providers.

"The Internet of Things is the next big wave of computing. It will touch more aspects of our lives and have a more profound effect on the workforce than we can begin to imagine," said Duncan Wilson, principal investigator, ICRI Cities, Intel.

The platform will use Xively’s Cloud to provide apps and support the visualisation of data that can be collected by schools through classroom-based internet of things projects.

"It’s critical that schools understand how to leverage the internet of things so they can enhance the quality of education and prepare students to be active contributors to, and beneficiaries of, this 21st century industrial revolution," said Chad Jones, vice-president of product strategy at Xively.

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