"Smart" flower pots and enthusiastic students

On March 28, the Germany-wide Girls’ Day 2019 took place at HHU. CEPLAS member Gunnar Klau and his workgroup “Algorithmic Bioinformatics” offered an exciting hands-on activity for five female students.

The task: to program a flower pot with the help of an iPad and a microcontroller so that the plant is able to sense when water is needed and turn on its own to the sun. Thus, with the „smart“ flower pot, the plant is able to optimize its living conditions autonomously.

Through the active involvement, the students could gain first experiences in programming and besides that, get insights into plants sciences from an informatics’ view. As a small souvenir, they could take home their flower pots and plants.