Samsung Electronics has established an alliance with the Technological Integrated Systems Laboratory (LSI-TEC) of Brazil to develop the “Code IoT” platform, which will teach free courses on Internet of Things, coding, basic electronics, robotics, and development of Android applications for interested persons.

The courses will run for six weeks and will be taught in Spanish, English and Portuguese. Participants who complete all the proposed tasks will receive a certificate at the end of each course, Samsung said in a release.

The first English course — ‘Introduction to the Internet of Things’ — began yesterday and should provide an understanding of Internet of Things, how it works, and familiarise participants with the technologies that allow its development.

Then, participants will be taught how to program with the Scratch language when the course ‘Learning to code’ commences on October 1. The third course begins on November 12 and will be on ‘Electronics: basic concepts and components’.

Samsung said the courses, which are completely free, are intended for students and teachers of basic and secondary education. However, anyone interested in the matter can register. Those registered will have access to the content of the workshops after its start.

“The aim of free online courses is to expand the interest and access to knowledge about the Internet of Things for anyone with internet or data in a smartphone. Additionally, with classes in Spanish, Portuguese and English, we can benefit more people in Latin America,” Nicole Orillac, regional manager of corporate citizenship at Samsung Electronics Latin America, was quoted as saying in the release.

The initiative is part of Samsung’s programme that offers the opportunity for young people to obtain technical training through free courses or scholarship grants, and to help improve their chances of entering the labour market.

According to Samsung, the partnership with the LSI-TEC was announced in 2016 and Code IoT is one of the great fruits of that partnership, as IoT is an issue that is increasingly present in the lives of people.

“We must not only connect groups of people through the Internet but also people with their objects, from cars to refrigerators, washing machines and other white goods,” said the release.

In the coming decades billions of smart devices are expected to be interconnected to data centres through wireless internet, interpreting information about the environment and interacting with the world.

This technology of intelligent devices connected to users and data centres through the Internet will allow the optimisation of various aspects of daily life in areas such as health, transport, agriculture and waste management.

A specific example is a fridge enabled with Wi-Fi connection, like the new Samsung Family Hub models, which will allow the user to see their contents while they are in the supermarket and decide what they need to buy. Or use voice control through the Bixby intelligent assistant to facilitate daily tasks, such as requesting recipe suggestions based on the contents of the refrigerator.

In turn, energy planners can obtain more nuanced data on the use of energy from different devices throughout the day to study or plan new energy supply or consumption projects for cities.

To register, get more information and learn about upcoming course dates, visit www.codeiot.org.br