Yes, on the motivation to learn science.  The civic issue activism is the driving factor supporting interest generation toward science.  The GIS maps were generated to examine if there was an issue around lack of access to healthy food and where the issue is.  What is interesting is that in the latest work the youth are moving toward more of a empowerment focused strategies where they proposed to us to start training middle school youth and establish larger scale urban farms where they youth are the ones that establishment a larger market that is specifically focused around selling food that is of interest to the people from that school and to teach residents about the science of how the food is grown through the creation of a urban cookbook.  

The connections have been a challenge, particularly how learning coding/robotics is related social/environmental justice.  In classrooms teachers have a lot of options around how they implement the program but all generally focus on using the growing of plants as the hook to get their students interesting in understanding the underlying science.  The youth program goes from 7th grade through 12th grade with three strands, early on the youth are exploring the basic of hydroponics, then onto solar energy ( you can see that work here:  https://www.nsf.gov/news/special_reports/science_nation/hydroponicsed.jsp) and then the youth move into the electronics coding.  The premise of the coding is to get to youth to automate the systems so they don't have to check on them all the time, but rather can send the information to their phone if the water is low.  This summer we are implementing a stronger social entrepreneurship component where youth will be designing desktop units and the corresponding electronic monitoring systems and they have to pitch their design to a group of venture capitalists on why they should invest in their idea.  The reason for this is that the students have decided to give all the greenhouse produce to a local boys and girls club and design systems that can help anyone to grow their own produce in their own apartment. 

Mike, first I want to thank you for this project. It is a very compelling and valuable way to approach science instruction. You mentioned that one challenge is showing how learning coding is related to social justice. However, it seems very clear to me. You have also addressed this issue when you indicated that by creating monitors students would be able to allow the technology to monitor their hydroponic systems, which frees them to engage in other work. So who is that has difficulty seeing this connection? I'd there some group of people that you have to "sell" on the idea of coding as it relates to this project?

Great question!  We have been working with youth for about 10 years and we were having students exploring urban ecological problems such as the ecological services provided by trees, urban noise impact on humans and wildlife.  These projects where heavily GIS focused and that lead to urban planning on why some areas had more green space than others.  The exploration of green space led to the impact of green space on health and how lower-income areas tended to have less green space and trees.  Then the youth transitioned into taking over vacant lots and we had partnered with the wonderful Placeways LLC as they had a tool that allowed youth to redesign a neighborhood.  We had the opportunity to work with two community development corporations that were trying to develop some land and the first thing that they wanted the youth to do was to explore what the neighborhood wanted and what could go in the vacant lots.  The top choices were grocery stores and playgrounds and places to shop.  This lead to a group doing an analysis of where all the supermarkets were as they were complaining that they only thing had in their neighborhood was liquor stores and fast food or convenience stores and when the youth looked at the map they wanted to figure out why there were no supermarkets near them and how they could fix that.  This led to (1) lets get a supermarket to move in (very difficult), and (2) what can we do to try to fix this - we began to look into and we met a venture capitalist who gave us the first hydroponic equipment to play with.   We were dubious, but we piloted the idea with a group of seniors about 6 years ago and we couldn't get them to leave the lab... so figured we were onto something... and then we discussed the idea with the youth and we came up with the idea of scaling up the hydroponics work and eventually we got the greenhouse on campus renovated and since then we have been improving (hopefully) the hydroponic work.  The big lesson that we learned through this process is (1) always listen to the youth and our job is to try to build the partnerships and structures to enable the youth to follow their ideas.  I admit, this is often a lot of work and tiring but well worth it.

Absolutely agreed on collaboration.  one of our great Ph.D. students Chris Asante is studying the collaboration aspect of the work from both the teachers and youth side.  He will probably be ready to present that work (I've steered him to watch you video as well).   The challenge is also setting up both collaboration with a bit of competition.  We usually have teams of students who are working together to design a system and argue why someone should invest their system over another teams while at the same learning from the other teams.  Almost like an small-business incubator environment.  

Hi Traci,

I'm helping with the mentoring aspect of the project & I'm happy to answer your questions. We're using a hybrid (in-person + online), near-peer mentoring model. The near-peer part refers to the narrow age gap between mentors roughly in their lower-20's and mentees who are currently high school juniors (will be seniors in the fall). The hybrid model in our case means that we start with in-person meetings & have those every two weeks or so during the semester. We supplement the in-person meetings with "virtual"/e-mentoring, primarily through text messaging or emails. For the virtual mentoring prompts we have partnered with MentorNet.

At least all of that is the project design... is terms of what is "happening", we're having some difficulties with the tech aspect of things (mentors/mentees not receiving prompts, e.g.) and adjusting to inconsistent attendance. For the summer and fall we're looking at additional paths for tech (social networks, e.g.), a more customizable sequence of prompts (i.e. the first and last prompts should be set, but in-between can be chosen by mentors/mentees), and different ways of pairing dyads (we did a first-come first-serve model to avoid interpersonal struggles, but those might be less detrimental than having dyads that aren't a good fit).

We have a bunch of interview data that one of my grad student colleagues and I will be analyzing this summer. In the mean time we'd love to hear what you think about our design and implementation, and also if you know any related projects of interest!

Kind regards,
Dave

Yes, one thing to add is that we have also found that the initial mentoring experience if just on-line can be rather overwhelming for some youth.  Hence the shift to a hybrid model.

Thanks Chris.  My wonderful colleague Catherine Wong is the leader (along with some fantastic students).  The graduate students with Catherine led a paper about the Social justice/STEM/activist framework which fleshes out the structure of the program much better.  http://trace.tennessee.edu/catalyst/vol7/iss1/4/

Thanks Anna, it is really the youth that have been driving the project.  Just our privilege to get to work with them.

Thanks!  Yes, the civic lab does some wonderful work and it is great to see a lot of those participatory budgeting initiatives sprouting up.  Boston has a similar initiative.  On a much smaller scale we have been engaging the youth in our NSF grant writing processes.  They are engaged with us on the brainstorming, the conceptualization of what would be of interest to them, and so on.  

Wonderful to hear from Christine and thanks for checking out the video.  The youth are just fantastic.  Our privilege to get to work with them.  

The other side of the project is work with teachers.  We have about 120 teachers do the current version of the hydroponics curriculum and another 35 will be joining us this summer from Massachusetts and Rhode Island.  A wonderful article that just came out was co-written by two of our great teachers:  

http://csl.nsta.org/2017/05/seeding-the-future/

We are also hopefully going to be launching our larger scale food justice ambassador program where high school in three cities will be training middle school youth in managing larger scale urban farms.  We will establish 8 new largeish scale (enough for middle school youth to harvest 1000 plants/week) in Boston (8 of them), in Waltham (3 of them), and in Springfield (6 of them).  We will have a total of 60 food justice ambassadors (high school youth) working with around 450 - 500 middle school across those cities.  Then in March we will have a food justice strand at the annual Massachusetts Agriculture conference where the youth present and share their work, and challenges.