Air pollution is one of our day's significant reasons for human health problems and affects every community throughout the world. Monitoring air pollution is a key aspect of raising awareness and pollution mitigation approaches followed by different nations. This paper targets to develop a low-cost Internet of things-based embedded system to measure and maintain air quality index (AQI) indicators at any locality. The system implemented here is minimal and can be deployed quickly and easily. The AQI measurement system was developed and tested for several periods, and recorded values of AQI were found to be in close agreement with actual values obtained from standard databases. In addition, several starting physics and electronics laboratory courses train students on measuring physical parameters over time. In this context, along with the introduction to the current pollution scenario and the challenges, this experiment will give a first-hand exposure of setting up a simple experiment and measuring a physical parameter to time. Students also learn to write simple programs and interface the experiment with a computer to record the results. The current work also demonstrates how to publish/subscribe the data using the message queue telemetry transport protocol.