Experience feedback and innovative pedagogical applications with HOME I/O

In the previous IFAC World Congress at Toulouse in 2017, HOME I/O was introduced as an innovative pedagogical tool. This software is the result of a R&D project between CReSTIC lab from the University of Reims Champagne-Ardenne (URCA) and Real Games, partially founded by the French Ministry of National Education, in order to design a virtual house adapted to control and STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) education. The main idea, from the beginning, has been to bring a virtual house into the classroom, adapted to learners and teachers and usable from middle schools to universities. To perform this goal, a free soft PLC called CONNECT I/O, enables to connect HOME I/O to external automation technologies (e.g. PLC, Modbus TCP, OPC DA, microcontrollers...). All over the world, around 800 middle, high schools and universities use HOME I/O. Teachers and students' feedback have been taken into account by updating HOME I/O with new add-ons and features like: a simpler licensing system (2016), Scratch 2.0 (2017) integration and Python 3.x integration (2019). This paper presents these new features and a selection of some innovative pedagogical applications performed by teachers from middle school, high school, university, and even primary school! HOME I/O seems to prove that it is possible to have one simulation tool adapted to different levels of training and enabling original pedagogical approaches: flipped classroom, pedagogic digital twin, learning from errors, projects…