THE DEVELOPMENT OF AN IOT PLATFORM THAT SUPPORTS COLLABORATIVE LEARNING IN PRIMARY SCHOOLS

The environment of higher education in Malaysia is changing dramatically over the
past decades. Teaching, learning and evaluation process is undergoing a lot of changes
when viewed in the perspectives of IT. STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and
Mathematics) has been implemented in schools beginning 2017 to improve the
education in Malaysia (Ramli & Talib, 2017). However, the STEM subjects in schools
and higher institutions has been declining. The number of students that have chosen
the STEM field is decreasing. This gradual drop is because the students are not
interested in STEM and students prefers to select subject that are much easier and
simpler. Therefore, initiative need to be taken to retool teaching and learning for
Science subject with help of technology. It also a part of planning to catalyst STEM
human resources in Malaysia. In order to prevent declining enrolment of STEM field,
Science teachers require a new teaching and learning approach to enhance students’
comprehension of science subject and to inspire students to pursue in the STEM field
in future. The key purpose of this paper is to develop a robotic car and an IoT platform
that supports collaborative learning in the science subject for primary school standard
six students and teacher. The robotic car allows teachers to diversify teaching concept
of the science subject with IoT technology. Robotic car will consist of sensors to
gather data from the experiment and stored in the cloud. In addition, the developed
application is to display those data as well as to support teachers to upload their
teaching notes and exercises. The teachers and students from other primary schools
can access this application and use it for teaching and learning purposes. Therefore,
the main intend of this project is to increase student interest towards science subject
by adopting IoT technology.