Flow Programming: A Flexible way to bring the Internet of Things into the Lab

In this paper we present a laboratory activity aimed at teaching fundamental aspects in programming Internet of Things systems while exploring edge, cloud and middleware components. The whole activity is built on top of visual tools based on the Flow Programming paradigm Node-red. Node-red provides an abstract view of the underlying communication network and facilitates the integration of different types of endpoints. Publish subscribe architectures are also very useful to simplify communication and data exchange in the resulting IoT system. The proposed laboratory is structured in order support and stimulate teamwork activities. Furthermore, Node-red supports live coding on both local and remote machines. A cloud component provided by Ubidots Education has been integrated in the development process in order to get confidence with basic elements of cloud services.