  A local discontinuous Galerkin (LDG) method for approximating large
deformations of prestrained plates is introduced and tested on several
insightful numerical examples in our previous computational work. This paper
presents a numerical analysis of this LDG method, focusing on the free boundary
case. The problem consists of minimizing a fourth order bending energy subject
to a nonlinear and nonconvex metric constraint. The energy is discretized using
LDG and a discrete gradient flow is used for computing discrete minimizers. We
first show $\Gamma$-convergence of the discrete energy to the continuous one.
Then we prove that the discrete gradient flow decreases the energy at each step
and computes discrete minimizers with control of the metric constraint defect.
We also present a numerical scheme for initialization of the gradient flow, and
discuss the conditional stability of it.
