New content of teaching via an interdisciplinary agile approach to tackle digital challenges in the field of indoor vertical farming

Content of teaching is often highly specialized for each course of studies, and students rarely have the possibility to learn more about related content which is outside of the subject area. Nevertheless, e.g. in indoor vertical farming, not only horticultural expertise is required to face the need for automated processes throughout the whole supply chain. We present here a unique approach to bring students from different courses of study together to develop digital solutions for these challenges in an agile environment. Agile in this context means letting students from different disciplines work together in a self-organized manner without hierarchies and based on the project management framework Scrum. In a first attempt, we let students with horticultural and bioinformatics backgrounds develop a digital tool that automates early detection of nitrogen deficiency for sunflowers grown in a greenhouse.