Participatory Development in Indigenous Rural Schools for Adopting IoT in Agrifood

There is a disparity in access to new technologies between urban and rural areas, being more noticeable in indigenous communities. This work shows the participatory development of IoT greenhouses in two rural elementary schools. We developed participatory workshops to involve the school students in co-designing and implementing the technological IoT greenhouses. The topics of the workshops were water, energy, and IoT sensors. The early involvement of the children allows us to create IoT kits composed of wireless sensors and actuators and deploy them into the greenhouses. The resulting kits are commanded via a web server, in which the student can access dashboards with real-time data, including ground temperatures and humidity in different greenhouse sectors, ambient temperature and humidity, command the irrigation, and view the total amount of water used. The resulting outcome has a significant impact in the long term because of the transforming experience for the school students.