Half an hour into a cooking competition at Green Street Academy, Tyana Givens, 15, dipped a plastic spoon into a pot simmering with ground turkey, tomatoes, bell peppers, onions, garlic and mushrooms over a burner in a science classroom.

She and the two other students, Kalimah Ball and Maya Smith, both 17, were making meat sauce from scratch to toss with rotini.

The girls had spent the past five weeks learning how to grow their own produce using food computers — tabletop greenhouses controlled by computer programs — at Green Street Academy, a charter school in Baltimore. The course, which weaved together lessons on programming, food systems and agriculture, culminated with an “Iron Chef”-style cooking contest.