Planting a Garden as a Little Computational Gardener

Gardening adventure starts!

Let your child become computational gardener while planting a garden. Are you ready for fun, educational, and sustainable environment computational thinking activity? This week, your child uses computational thinking on planting a garden as a little gardener game!

How to Play

You are planning to raise up a child who loves gardening. This game is for you and your child to do gardening together. Together, you and your child will be able to plant seeds, water and wait to see how it grows, in addition, gardening is an activity you can enjoy with your children while exploring data collection, experimenting, and decomposing. Teach your child how to plant flowers, fruits, or vegetables. Plan on allowing him/her to do most of the work involved while applying computational thinking. In this example, we will show you how to plant a flower, however, it is completely up to your decision. Besides, your child will collect, analyze and interpret data based on growing flower process every day.

Step 1: Introduction to Planting!

Planting is one of the most exciting and experimental experiences of your child daily life. Begin explaining slowly and gradually to your child that plants need soil, water, sun and air to grow.

Additionally, start providing all of the necessary supplies and define each one of them to your child.

Demonstrate to your child the seeds, and let your children know that all of the food the flower needs is inside.

Explain to your child why flowers need water, sun, and air. Besides, you would even connect flowers' needs with humans' needs.

Step 2: Keep working on gardening

Ask open-ended questions that allow your child to articulate what is the process of planting.

Allow your child to fill in the flower pot with soil.

Have him/her dig a hole in the center of the soil with his/her finger and drop in several seeds, and then cover over the seeds with the soil. Let them gently push soil on top of the seeds, tucking them in well.

Let your child try, explore, and fail, however, help him/her out if he/she needs any help. Instead of doing everything he/she needs, mentor your child to complete the task by cooperating with you or his/her sibling(s).

Step 3: Watering and Questioning

Relax for a while and debrief. Ask several questions to make sure your child understands the process of gardening. If your child wants to say something, ask him/her to express it through verbally.

Show your child how to tilt the watering can to water the flower seeds without spilling the water.

Let your child take great care by watering them daily, waiting for them to grow. Have her put the flower pots in a sunny window.

Just make sure your child knows flower gets plenty of water and light.

Step 4: Observing flower growth

After planting the seeds, children learn the importance of experimenting while observing and analyzing flowers' growth

Have him/her check each day to see whether a sprout is emerging.

Continue encouraging your child to care for his/her flower.

He/she may enjoy measuring the plant each day and describe his/her flowers look like as the days go on. Ask some questions to your child as the experiment going on.

For example, you would ask do seeds need light to grow? After flowers' seeds are planted, should we put them on the window sill? Why or why not?

Encourage your child to plot the results on the graph. For example, let him/her draw a graph with the x-axis representing the days and the y-axis representing the height of the plant.