Designing educational kit to involve children in collaborative learning activities at school

The research started from a reflection on the “collaborative learning”, as an approach to teaching and learning involving groups of students working together according to specific goals. The work focused on the cultivation of green areas in urban locations, in particular on the vegetable garden. Nowadays the vegetable garden cultivation is practiced even within urban buildings for domestic purpose and in schools courtyards as a collaborative learning strategy for children. According to this approach this work has focused on indoor learning environments at kindergarden and primary school. This work aims at helping this learning practice based on agricultural activity at school, through the use of a kit containing a series of products and an Application with AR technology for tablet that allows the cultivation according to a tutoring method and a memorandum of all the farming phases. The project, based on the renewed interest in biological products and their seasonality, proposes tools for children, able to detect the indoor climate conditions and, according to them, let the appropriate cultivations grow, thus avoiding the need for a controlled micro-climate, such as that of greenhouses or hydroponic systems. The final aim is not only to facilitate children to the cultivation, but also to find new didactic instruments to convey knowledge of natural science starting from specific manuals about vegetables and farming, completed by suggested recipes for the usage of the harvested fruits/vegetables. It is a whole productive cycle, starting from the knowing of the product, the cultivation and the plant, moving from theory to practice, following the farming step by step, up until the harvesting and consuming of the final product. This activity makes children able to take care of their plantation in a playful and active way and at the same time teaching them practical and theoretical activities with the final goal to take care of themselves of the nature and of biological ecosystems of our planets.