Learning in and beyond school gardens with cyber-physical systems

This design-based research study considers the learner-generated design and refinement of a school garden. We report one enactment of the Connected Gardening project in order to illuminate and understand how a fourth-grade class organizes and refines its garden plot using observations of the physical environment and evaluations of data from a networked digital probe. By examining the ways individuals, materials, and activities influence, and are influenced by, one another, our qualitative analysis characterizes interplay among an ecosystem, a garden and graphical representations of environmental indicators in real time and over time. We consider the novel affordances of such a cyber-physical systems for supporting participatory culture within yet beyond school classrooms.