I-Corps: Plant Growth Chambers and Curriculum for Educational Applications

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The broader impact/commercial potential of this I-Corps project will be the increase of student engagement in STEM topics, as well as stimulating student engagement in critical challenges such as space exploration, climate change, plant-focused genetic engineering and improvement, and feeding an ever-increasing global population. These deliverables will be implemented via a novel STEM curriculum and hardware kits to K-12 schools across the United States. The hardware/curriculum method of combination is purposefully designed to first grab student interest, then teach the required STEM coursework, and finally suggesting careers relevant to each STEM topic discussed. Encompassing all of this will be curriculum design and thorough documentation that does not put an additional workload on the teachers applying it to their classrooms. Planning for an impact further in the future, all of the hardware will collect data from and images of the experiments conducted within them.This I-Corps project further develops a low cost, reusable plant growth chamber that features data collection and a controlled environment previously unavailable on the education market. The technology involved in this includes a single board computer, temperature/humidity sensors, photoperiod sensors, sensor-driven actuation of the temperature level and photoperiod, a camera with limited computer vision capabilities, and equipment to verify nutrient solution consistency. This combination of hardware allows the enthusiasm and distributed numerical power of the citizen scientist to be empowered with technical capability in a way that neither the plant science nor education communities have seen before. This will encourage and accelerate learning by allowing more reliable data collection of various defined growing environments in order to create more accurate plant growth recipes.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.