Apparently, I tricked you. 
I actually used to teach (at the college level; I’m not sure I would have survived to tell the story if the age group was any younger…), so I was just thinking of the background knowledge one might need, if any, and what gaps this is intending to fill. I’m sure your marketing people (person?) would have better ideas than me!
I guess I skipped a step: Philips Hue was my first smart home product, but at the time they had limited to no automation capabilities (still somewhat true, but at least they have remote control devices, motion sensors, and voice control — none of which existed back then, except maybe the schedules feature that they also now have). I wanted some way to automate this, and tried a couple ideas before landing on SmartThings since they had an integration and what I’d read about them suggested I could do motion lighting. (And I indeed could, but using the cloud became problematic…)
I really can’t remember but suspect it was reading the ST docs. (I know, I know: NERD! But Z-Wave and Zigbee were mostly what ST did at that time — way before Samsung bought them and convinced you that you wanted a smart fridge or whatever.) Some of them seemed similar in goal to the above: telling you at a high level how the protocols worked and how to build a mesh.