Exploiting the Internet of Things to teach domain-specific languages and modeling the arduinoML project

The Computer Science department of the University of Nice - Sophia Antipolis is offering a course dedicated to Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) in its graduate curriculum. This course exists since 2006, and was usually badly perceived by students, despite many reorganizations of both course contents and teaching methods. This paper is an experience report that describes the latest version of this course. It relies on a case study leveraging domain-specific languages and open-source microcontrollers to support the domain modeling of Internet of Things pieces of software. It exploits domain modeling as a pivot to illustrate MDE concepts (e.g., meta-modeling, model transformation), coupled to very practical labs where students experiment their models on real microcontrollers. This new version was well received by students.