#14 1 Abstract— This paper reports results of an ethnographic study undertaken to support the development of an educational tool for a context-aware computing project. This research looked at how teachers use an agricultural context (i.e., school gardens) to teach and how farmers learn within the context of a farm. The goal of this research was to define a set of needs that we could address in developing an educational application that makes use of a mobile device that includes high-definition video, broadband connectivity, and various on-board sensors. More importantly, this mobile device will, on the basis of these data, generate inferences to be used in computer vision and other applications. Our immediate future work is to explore ways in which devices of this type can influence learning and teaching. Index Terms— Educational technology, intelligent sensors, machine vision, learning systems, planning I. INTRODUCTION THNOGRAPHIC methods are more and more frequently used in the development of technological artifacts. These methods offer "a way of understanding the particulars of daily life in such a way as to increase the success probability of a new product or service or, more appropriately, to reduce the probability of failure specifically due to a lack of understanding of the basic behaviors and frameworks of consumers.[1]" The use of these methods here is intended to uncover ways in which context awareness might be applied in an educational setting, specifically while using a mobile sensing and computation device. Considerable research has been done in the development of mobile sensing and computational devices both in applied sciences and in education. Within applied sciences, some relevant work has addressed tools to be used by scientists, for example, mobile computer vision tools for biodiversity researchers [2], while other research looks at tools to enhance data collection even by interested amateurs, for example, enabling distributed mobile sensing in an urban environment [3]. Within the education world, research has addressed ways in which the tools of scientists can be applied in education [7]. Combined, these research thrusts point the way toward a specific technology enabled context-aware pedagogy. Richard Beckwith is with the People and Practices Research group in Intel Research. 2111 Amberglen Pkwy AG1-110. Hillsboro, OR phone: 503-456- 4760; e-mail: richard.beckwith@intel.com). Sharon Greenfield is with the People and Practices Research group in Intel Research. The current research investigates the potential value of sensing and computation on mobile devices in what might be considered unique settings. These settings include school gardens (primarily horticultural) and small-holder farms and are unique only in not having been widely addressed in the pervasive computing (with some exceptions, e.g., [4], [5]) or educational technology literatures. These settings are not unique for many reasons not least being that gardening is one of the most popular pastimes in many countries in the developed world and agriculture is the most common economic activity world wide. According to the World Fact Book [6], approximately 40% of all economically active people on the face of the earth are involved in agriculture, this is especially the case outside of the US and Western Europe. This puts agriculture well ahead of any other specific domain in terms of the number of individuals involved and suggests that well-designed applications in this domain should find a ready audience. An additional reason for looking in this area is that farming, generally, and food production, in particular, have proven to be challenges for the 21st century. How do farmers get the support they need to manage a farm under changing conditions brought on by global climate change? How do young farmers in sub-Saharan Africa learn to farm when a generation of war and AIDS has decimated the population of elder farmer/teachers? How do students learn about the science underlying agriculture as well as agricultural practice itself? Context aware computing holds the promise of being able to deliver education that can solve these problems and our work seeks to move in just that direction. To that end we have investigated areas where benefits might lie as well as difficulties. II. PRIOR WORK Educational researchers have long discussed the ways in which the tools of scientists can be applied to science education [7], [9]. Because so much of what scientists do is reflected in the demand characteristics of their tools [8], learning to wield these same tools can fill a significant role in education [10]. Situated cognition educationists, following from Lave and Wegner’s work [8], have argued that scientific knowledge is embedded in the tools, workplaces, and professional routines of scientists and, consequently, student scientists would benefit from instruction using the tools and following the routines of scientists. There can be an additional benefit of students using the tools and practices of scientists. By attempting to replicate some of the routines of scientists, students can contribute data to projects with a much wider geographic footprint than scientists could otherwise afford to Context Aware Education for Agriculture Richard Beckwith and Sharon Greenfield E