The Southwestern University Greenhouse Monitoring System

The Southwestern University Greenhouse has a large, ever-changing collection of plants and environmental variables that need to be tracked. This can be a challenging task for a large group, and even more so for individual people. Our Computer Science capstone project was to create a web application to assist the Southwestern Garden Club in monitoring the numerous changes in plants and environmental factors within the greenhouse. To achieve this, we created a functional, dynamic web page using HTML/CSS, Flask, Javascript, and SQLAlchemy. This web page utilizes visual symbols, clickable images, and a dynamically generated form that links to a database. When the images are clicked, the form is populated with information from the database. Garden Club members can edit this form by adding information about the plant(s) they worked with, including the type of plant, latest watering date, and other general information. The form then updates the database with the new information provided by the members. The web page also allows users to track in which specific beds their plants are located. This project provided several learning opportunities in all aspects of computer science, and will provide a much-needed resource for the Southwestern Garden Club.