ECOGROW: A LOW-COST SMART GREENHOUSE TEACHING PLATFORM FOR PROJECT-BASED ENGINEERING EDUCATION ALIGNED WITH THE SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT GOALS

Engineering education increasingly faces a dual requirement: graduates must master embedded sensing, actuation, and basic control, while also developing sustainability-oriented decision-making competencies. This paper presents EcoGrow, a low-cost smart greenhouse teaching platform designed for Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) and project-based learning (PBL) in resource-constrained contexts. EcoGrow integrates an Arduino Mega 2560, a DHT22 temperature–humidity sensor, an I2C LCD, relay-driven actuators (12 V fan, mist pump, and lighting), and a Windows Forms (WinForms) desktop application communicating via serial for real-time monitoring, manual override, threshold configuration, and data logging. Rather than positioning EcoGrow as a novel greenhouse automation product, we frame it as a replicable teaching intervention that makes sustainability operational through measurable trade-offs (e.g., stability vs. duty cycle; humidity recovery vs. water proxy) and transparent control design choices (e.g., hysteresis, minimum on/off time). The paper contributes (i) a replicable hardware–software architecture for hands-on sustainability-oriented engineering education, (ii) a structured PBL module with explicit alignment to SDG 4, SDG 2, SDG 12, and SDG 13, and (iii) an evidence-based evaluation framework combining learning artifacts, rubric-based assessment, and log-derived indicators suitable for publishable reporting. The results from demonstration and classroom deployment show that EcoGrow reliably supports core learning outcomes in embedded systems and control, while enabling explicit sustainability reasoning grounded in data.