Middle School Students Coding To Understand The Future Of Food

As the world population approaches 7 billion and the environmental conditions in our world continue to change, the next generation is going to have to be able to understand new and creative methods for producing food. To that end, students in grades 6, 7 and 8 at West Hollow Middle School in the Half Hollow Hills Central School District are working with their new FarmBot, an open-source farming robot that allows them to automate the process of growing produce. The objective is for students to grasp a deeper understanding of alternative agricultural practices that could sustain food supplies in harsh growing environments such as the arctic, crowded urban cities, or even a space colony.

Students can program the FarmBot to seed the soil, water plants, take photographs for time-lapsed growing and plant health monitoring, take soil moisture readings, and eliminate weeds. The produce grown with the FarmBot is being utilized in a farm-to-table project, where Family and Consumer Science teachers are using it in recipes that they are teaching to their students. The students also intend to grow crops that will be donated to Island Harvest, so that their produce can be brought to community members struggling with food insecurity.

“The goal is to combine computational thinking, data collection and analysis, electronics and prototyping, and general good science practices to better understand plants, food production, and the resources needed to reduce food insecurity,” said Christopher Regini, a science teacher in the building that is leading the project.

Dozens of students had a hand in constructing the various components that were needed to assemble the robot in the building’s atrium. Now that planting has begun, students in the Makerspace are using a drag-and-drop programming platform to establish sequences for the care of the plants, and building them into regimens that will be executed automatically by the FarmBot going forward. Students in the ‘Hack the Hollow’ coding and engineering club are embedding various sensors and monitoring mechanisms within the FarmBot to field test their designs. Eventually, the students would like to design and 3D print new tools for the FarmBot that will make their prototypes part of the working system.

The students are also collecting data from the FarmBot to compare with their vertical hydroponics MarsFarm, another project aimed at showing students alternative agricultural practices that can be employed in non-traditional growing environments. The MarsFarm garden is a soilless growing environment that makes use of hydroponic techniques and embedded technology to monitor and control system variables, allowing the students to collect and analyze that data while monitoring it from afar. The students are using FlipGrid, a video discussion platform, to communicate their agricultural experiences with others students from around the world, in places like Port Chester, St. Louis, Acapulco and China.

“The vertical hydroponics data is passed along to researchers at Princeton University as part of a citizen science project, and sent to a NASA program called Growing Beyond Earth that is run by Fairchild Botanical Gardens,” added Regini. “The goal is to apply STEAM education in a way that is meaningful, allowing us to focus on topics already within the science curriculum, while engaging students in a practice that equips them with the 21st century skills that make them future-ready.”

An education-oriented community with high academic expectations, the Half Hollow Hills Central School District is located in a residential area of 50,000 people in the central part of Long Island, approximately 40 miles from New York City. Providing for the education of almost 8,000 students, the school district has five elementary schools, two middle schools and two high schools. Half Hollow Hills High Schools are fully accredited by the New York State Department of Education. The district is committed to providing all students with opportunities to excel in academics, athletics and the arts.