The Digital Seed project was a exploration of preschool children's learning about plant growth and plant life cycles.

We created an interactive "toy", a physical box that showed a virtual seed. The display was a Compaq iPAQ handheld fastened inside the box, connected to a PIC board and light, temperature, and water flow sensors. Children could pour water through the box, causing the display to show rain, shine a flashlight on the box to cause the sun to move through the sky, etc. The animated seed could either thrive and complete the plant's lifecycle or wither, as dictated by a finite state machine driven by the children's interactions.

I contributed to the system design, implemented the iPAQ software, and also helped to evaluate the device with children.