STEM in the garden: How to monitor plants with IoT sensors and Grafana

According to multiple research studies, boys and girls show equal levels of interest in technology as early as five or six years old. But by the age of nine, a noticeable gap begins to emerge — girls’ confidence and enthusiasm for STEM subjects often start to decline. This isn’t due to a lack of ability but rather a combination of subtle social cues, stereotypes, and a lack of relatable role models or experiences.

As a mum to an 8-year-old girl, this struck a chord. I wanted to create a fun, hands-on way to nurture her curiosity and confidence in tech before that confidence gap could settle in. So, we teamed up to build a project that combined her love of gardening with my passion for technology: a soil moisture sensor that monitors the health of our plants using Arduino, Prometheus, and Grafana.

In this talk, I’ll share our journey of building the project together—from wiring up the hardware and programming the ESP32 board to sending data to Prometheus and visualizing it in Grafana. I'll also share all the gardening analogies I used to explain complex concepts like observability, monitoring, and time series data in a way that felt natural and exciting for her.

Whether you’re a tester who's curious about observability, someone who wants to try an IoT side project, or just tired of guessing when to water your plants, this session will show how approachable these tools and ideas can be. You’ll leave with a working example of how to use Arduino, Prometheus, and Grafana together, a beginner-friendly explanation of observability, and ideas for how testers can start exploring monitoring in a hands-on way.