A five-week program piloted this fall gives students hands-on experience to see how agriculture and technology can combine in today’s workforce:
What is green and crunchy — and might help high schoolers unlock a future career?
The answer is all about educational partnerships. Virginia Western Community College has developed a 5-week hydroponics project for high school classrooms, using a hydroponics tower to grow Buttercrunch lettuce. A sensor creates graphical visualizations of data, and students interpret the data that has been collected over the project’s duration.
They also get to taste-test the lettuce. In the Engineering Program at Roanoke County’s Burton Center for Arts & Technology, students wished each other “Cheers!” before sampling in the fourth week of the program on Oct. 16. They remarked that it tasted fresh, was crunchy and not bitter at all. “Quite delicious!”
All this is possible thanks to an Advanced Technological Education grant that the National Science Foundation awarded to Virginia Western last year to develop connections between the College’s Agriculture and Mechatronics programs. The Cross-Pollination Skillsets project focuses, in part, on building Virginia’s workforce in controlled environmental agriculture.
“We created this program to allow high-school students to see a real-life project combining agriculture and technology,” said Cynthia Fairbanks, Ag-Tech Program Assistant and Adjunct Professor in Virginia Western’s School of STEM, who leads the high school initiative. “The program teaches some amazing hands-on skills with technology and agriculture and opens the conversation of data literacy,” Fairbanks said.
In addition to the Burton Center, the program is running this fall at the Roanoke city’s Charles W. Day Technical Education Center (DAYTEC) and Lord Botetourt High School, with plans to expand to more schools this spring.