  Besides wide attraction in the industry, IoT is being used to advance STEM
and STEAM education across a range of education levels. This work presents a
remote sensing platform, named IoT with a Soft Touch, developed to achieve two
goals. First, it aims to lower the technicality, stimulating the students to do
STE(A)M. Second, the technology is to be used in `softer' applications (e.g.,
environmental and health care), thereby aiming to attract a more diverse set of
student profiles. Students can easily build a wireless sensing device, with a
specific application in mind. The modular design of the platform and an
intuitive graphical configurator tool allows them to tailor the device's
functionality to their needs. The sensor's data is transmitted wirelessly with
LoRaWAN. The data can be viewed and analyzed on a dashboard, or the raw data
can be extracted for further processing, e.g., as part of the school's STE(A)M
curriculum. This work elaborates on the low-power and modular design
challenges, and how the platform is used in education.

Computers and Society;Networking and Internet Architecture