# Integration of Autonomous Wireless Sensor Networks in Academic School Gardens
## 4 Application Design and System Validation  
This section presents the developed educational application based on the EnOcean WSN deployed on school gardens. School gardens are becoming increasingly popular in urban districts as they are a very useful educational resource for urban schools. They boost students' interest in learning specific botanical concepts by allowing them to engage in agricultural practices on a small scale and they help students become responsible caretakers by teaching them the responsibilities and impacts of land cultivation. Besides, the students start using and learning technological concepts such as sensors, wireless communications and clouds. But the benefits of school gardens as complementary educational tools do not stop there. The application presented in this work, called MySchoolGardenApp, covers a large number of educational impact areas in addition to those previously presented. For instance, it increases students' interest in several topics including the following: the value of the natural environment and its importance in human life, the history of different crops, mathematics for the calculus of surfaces, weights collected, number of fruits and, in higher courses, the use and interpretation of graphs on time and the Internet search on different cultivation methods. Figure 10 describes the areas MySchoolGardenApp has the largest impact on. A simple system architecture is required to support the application (see Figure 11). EnOcean's STM 330 nodes gather the information and transfer it wirelessly (868.3 MHz) to a gateway node located in the building. This USB-based gateway is connected to a PC, which is in charge of the collection and management of data and its transmission to the cloud. This channel is also used to provide control commands to the sensor nodes when needed. The used PC is an Ubuntu 16.4 Linux computer that uses a RESTful API to transfer data to the cloud (Amazon) by means of a web service. Basically, the periodically collected information is transferred to the cloud. In addition, meteorological information obtained from a web service run by the Government of Navarre ([[http://meteo.navarra.es](http://meteo.navarra.es)]([http://meteo.navarra.es](http://meteo.navarra.es))) is used to complement the locally collected data (temperature). Through this efficient data acquisition process, all the information the application needs (including the meteorological information and the harvested data) is statistically merged and processed using Amazon's RDS (Relational Database Service) and RStudio Server. Finally, access to the generated reports, statistical data analysis tools and all user  
Figure 9: Performance comparison between EnOcean and ZigBee in terms of BER for the linear path depicted in Figure 5. (**a**) First floor; (**b**) Second floor; (**c**) Third floor. process capabilities and features (restricted by the user profile) are available through mobile devices (smartphones and tablets), electronic boards and computers using the Wi-Fi network of the building. From a software level view, MySchoolGardenApp has different Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs) to accommodate different user types. The different GUIs allow the system to restrict data access and function usage based on a given user's user type. An Administrator profile is available to control the performance of the application by monitoring features and accounts and making adjustments if necessary. The Administrator is also responsible for the management and maintenance of the hardware infrastructure sensor network, the gateway, communications and the software licenses required for data processing (Amazon RDS and RStudio Server). At the operational level, Teacher and Student profiles are available. Teachers are able to exploit the application's features to design activities, set and manage schedules and alerts and analyse data to assess students' performance. Students, similarly, can benefit greatly from the application by using its interactive learning tools.