Chapter submission to “Emergent Practices and Material Conditions in Teaching and Learning with Technologies,” Springer volume edited by Tessy C-Pargman and Isa Jahnke, Latest update: April 3, 2018. Word count: 6000 Material Conditions of Collaborative Knowledge Construction: The Case of Monoplant Anders I. Mørch 1 , Hani Murad 2 , Jo Herstad 2 , Sjur Seibt 2 , and Morten Kjelling 2 Dept. of Education 1 and Dept. of Informatics 2 , University of Oslo, Norway Abstract: Monoplant is a prototype of an educational construction kit that provides teachers and secondary school students with hands-on experience on plant biology. We present the design rationale of Monoplant and report on its three-week deployment in a high school classroom. The students (N=14) used Monoplant to solve a photosynthesis assignment requiring them to compare the growth of two plants (one exposed to natural light and another to artificial green light). We used a qualitative approach to collect and analyze data, with observation, video recording, and interaction analysis as the main methods. The students worked in groups, and we video-recorded the verbal and non-verbal interactions of one group (N=4). The two plants and Monoplant’s visualizations of the plants’ growth, together with the textbook, were the resources that the students used when solving the assignment. These material conditions provided an explorative design space for the students’ collaborative learning, and many hypotheses were raised during the hands-on activity with materials and representations. Furthermore, we suggest an emergent practice based on our findings, which are teachers’ maker spaces for creating material conditions for students’ domain-specific collaborative knowledge construction. INTRODUCTION With the advent of the Internet of things, sensors have become available in many different forms and packages. Almost as flexible as Lego bricks, sensors are relatively inexpensive and can be used as building blocks in different applications. To explore this infrastructure for educational purposes, two of the authors designed and built Monoplant for teaching and learning plant biology. With Monoplant, plants in pots are connected to sensors that measure temperature, humidity, light level, and soil moisture. Monoplant supports students’ hands-on interaction with plants and provides visualizations of the key environmental variables contributing to plant growth. In this way, the causal relationships that are important for understanding scientific concepts, such as photosynthesis, can be represented in meaningful ways. By interacting with Monoplant, students are stimulated to discuss, analyze, and reason with observed (biological) phenomena and (visual and numeric) representations to create alternative explanations, which is a step beyond learning from conventional textbooks (text and static diagrams). Thus we provide support of both physical and conceptual dimensions of learning. The rest of the chapter is organized as follows. We argue that collaborative knowledge construction in computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) needs a better material foundation that supports hands-on activities. We present the design rationale of Monoplant for addressing the challenge, as well as the research questions guiding our research. Then, our methods are described. Next, we present and analyze the data by showing concrete examples, and we discuss our findings by comparing them with those reported in related work. Finally, we present emergent practices based on our work (construction kits for teachers, teachers as designers).