Connected Garden

This project, funded by the Advanced Distributed Learning (ADL) Co-Lab here in Orlando, acts as a proof of concept to demonstrate how sensors can create data streams based on real environmental information. We will be creating an outdoor vegetable garden at the IST facility to mimic a typical community garden-sized setup. The data captured will be stored in a LMS that is also populated by a learner’s data stream. The focus of this project is the sensor data stream; learner data streams will be used for testing server integration.

The garden consists of a central control unit where all sensors will be attached. We will be using the arduino microcontroller for our control unit. The arduino is designed to take inputs from various types of sensors. The types of information we will be gathering may be broken into two distinct categories, Environment (light, temperature, moisture data) and Interaction (RFID data on the garden tool(s).

These data streams will populate a repository where information will dynamically alter elements of a virtual environment that ADL is using for transmedia research.

The Connected Garden: Informing PAL development by connecting physical and virtual worlds through real world data capture using arduino sensors and ADL’s xAPI, Phase I