Internet of Things (IoT) seems to be a popular term nowadays, for business, society and teaching alike. Teaching students about such concepts and more importantly, making them aware of the many competency components (often called KSA-knowledge, skills, abilities) required in the development of IoT systems, services and products has been a major aim in the teaching design presented in this paper. The snowball metaphor symbolizes added layers of input, comments and suggestions delivered by Belgian, Swedish and Chinese students respectively, to peers with different backgrounds (study level, subject major, etc.). Open-platform exercises using Arduino kits are used as starting points and reports. Conceptualizations and suggestions are carried through the snowball ’chain’, which ends nearly two years later. Knowledge components are delivered e.g. through lectures. Among skills developed are practice in receiving input from and delivering output to groups different also in culture, knowledge, etc. Abilities include a demonstrated (and graded) proficiency in combining the acquired set of components, as demonstrated in workshops, discussions and reports, and in a proposed feedback loop to Sweden from China (not yet implemented). © 2017 IEEE.