How can a high school student learn more about the IoT? (Hint: Be a maker)

On our most recent IoT podcast, a high-school student called in with a question to our voicemail hotline. She wants to learn more about the IoT in her final school semester and is looking for advice on and how to do that. She’s done some small IoT projects and has been told to avoid online classes to learn about the IoT.

As an IoT person who is taking computer science classes just for personal enrichment at a local community college, I love this question! Aside from doing my own small IoT projects, taking online and in-person classes, I have some perspective to offer.

First, I’m not against online classes or YouTube tutorials at all. I’ve learned quite a bit over the years about programming and the IoT from such videos. There’s a wealth of free information available, although you have to weed out some of the content that isn’t useful. 

Second, I think one of the best ways to learn about the IoT is to dive in and get your hands dirty. What I mean by that is to come up with a small project, do some research or watch some videos, and then try to implement a solution yourself. 

This is precisely what I did in 2018 when I created an ambient notification system in my home office: I used a little Python combined with a few APIs and got a LiFX bulb to indicate if the price of Bitcoin was up or down. At the time, I had very little programming knowledge, so I relied on videos and programming tutorials to learn what I needed to know.

And that brings me to another useful tip: Buy yourself a Raspberry Pi or Arduino board for projects like this. You don’t have to spend much money on these as they cost between $20 and $50 or so. Your investment gets you a small computing platform that can be connected by wire or wirelessly to sensors and the internet. 

Once equipped with some knowledge, a small computing board, and online resources, you can learn quite a bit about the IoT. The biggest investment of all will be your own determination and persistence!

In terms of some resources, we found several that offer relatively easy instructional projects if you need help or ideas. Here are just a few:

• Twilio quickstarts that focus on messaging solutions
• A Raspberry Pi image recognizer
• Over 200 IoT projects with an Arduino board
• IoT projects from Adafruit

We also recommend a pair of IoT Podcasts for makers and learners. Liz Moy has one via Twilio that’s outstanding. She hosts makers such as Christine Sunnu, who talked about IoT platforms and killing robots, for example. And the embedded.fm podcast is also useful, filled with different projects and IoT engineering topics each week.

To hear the question in full, as well as our discussion, tune in to the IoT Podcast below: