- Motivates students to spend extra time each day to learn the life-skills that will help them succeed academically, socially and economically.
- Provide daily exposure and practice living in a new world of an integrated virtual and physical space (the classroom/game greenhouse) – preparing our children to thrive in the coming 4th industrial revolution.
- Teach the “Law of the Harvest” and other critical lessons to tell a community story that makes a positive impact on families now and in the future.
- Invite parents and the business community into the learning process.
- Adds learning time to the day and additional funding to the school to pay for the program.
- Helps the school prepare students for a bright future.
The Classroom Grow Station – The Heroic Farms
Helping Schools Help Kids Prepare for the Future
The Heroic Game Day program delivers the following outcomes without requiring any classroom or teacher time:
Everybody wins: the student, family, business community and school.
Program Overview
- Life Skills Learning: Game-based learning motivates students to learn, master and apply the following “Top 20 Skills” that everyone wants them to learn on their own time. These skills will help the student contribute to their family and community in the next industrial revolution regardless of what they choose to do in the future. We recommend 30-60 minutes of learning afterschool anywhere and anytime.
- Training for the new Workplace: Many of the jobs our children will be doing in 10-20 years don’t exist today. So how do we prepare them? We teach them the life-skills and we give them experience interacting and working with other students around the world in a platform of integrated physical and virtual spaces. We have developed the first ever classroom grow station (vertical hydroponic) that is integrated into a multiplayer game (Heroic Game Day). What the students are doing in the game triggers certain things in the classroom and vice versa.
- Heroic Parents: We have gamified parental involvement and bring many parents into the learning process with just a few minutes of their time each month. The business community is also invited to participate in the creation of the skills learning content. They are motivated to help prepare the upcoming generation to be productive and happy citizens. Students will be able to start their Life-long Learning Portfolio which will keep track of the 20 skills they are learning and the certificates they are earning. Those certificates are accredited by our post-secondary partners and the business community.
- The Skills Coach: A teacher or parent in each school that spends a couple hours each day in the game and working with the kids in the classroom grow station, motivating kids to learn the skills in the game and the real-world greenhouse.
- More learning time and more funding: These are the two things we can deliver – an additional 30-60 minutes of experiential learning time and additional funding for each of the participating students (Title 1 and IEP students). We will not ask you for classroom time or funds
From Classroom to Garden to Urban Agriculture
The Heroic Game Day Classroom Grow Station can be integrated into the classroom in many ways. Typically gardens have been used to enhance science lessons. Lessons pertaining to plants are the easiest to teach with a garden but you should not limit yourself to only these types of lessons.
With the new innovative integration of the Classroom Grow Station to the Heroic Game Day game-based skills learning platform, the students will be able to learn and apply agriculture principles in the game that will impact what is happening in the physical garden in the classroom, and vice versa. This is a world first in education, and something that will prepare our children for a very different world as we move into the 4th industrial revolution.
Other than the obvious experience and exposure to urban agriculture, with enough creativity, and an engaged teacher, the garden and its activities can be applied to just about any lesson in the classroom. We can teach from the garden and look to inspire a myriad of professional opportunities and careers that the students may not know to exist.
Science and Math have been the subjects most frequently associated with the garden, and obviously the garden lends itself perfectly to teaching about plants and plant growth, yet so many other sciences can be applied including soil compositions, composting, etymology, and the interaction of plants and insects.
Allowing your students to plan and help design the garden can help them learn about measuring, engineering, and budgeting as well as entrepreneurial skills such as profitability and basic business foundations.
History and language arts lessons can also be enhanced from the garden. Teaching different cultural realities, and all the different foods that are grown all over the world we open up our students to the world around them and it all comes from the garden.
Poets and writers have been writing about gardens for centuries, and students may relate to the tale that much easier if they can be involved. A garden is the perfect place for hands-on acute learning, and the more it is used in both is physical and virtual forms, the more your students will learn from it.
Heroic Classroom Grow Station Program
The Heroic Classroom Grow Station is a program that will enable your teachers to utilize the garden as a resource center, rather than another layer of work.
In general, teachers that look to develop school gardens have some understanding of the growing principals of a hydroponic and soil garden, and have probably done lots of research on gardening, yet they do not have the time needed throughout their day to properly care for the garden, so we at the Heroic Farms have developed a program, where we install the garden, fill it with the proper soils, amendments etc. and set the garden up as an exterior classroom for the teachers.
Once the garden is installed, the Heroic Farms will provide a “Skills Coach” that is either a teacher or parent who is being paid to manage the classroom grow station. This Skills Coach working with our support team, the students and teachers will ensure the project is properly managed.
This “Teach the Teacher” program has valuable lessons from the garden and is guaranteed to enlighten the students in educating them as to where their food comes from, how it’s grown, and the many factors that go into the production of plants.
Once the Teachers are provided with this valuable information, the students will then plan out their garden(s) utilizing the square foot gardening method, and ultimately planting the seeds to their very own garden. Seedlings are grown and then planted in either the hydroponic tower or the soil pots.
On a regular basis, the Heroic Farms will support your school, identify any issues within the garden, follow up on lesson plans so that we maintain a level of accountability and advise and treat whatever issues may be present. We will monitor the progress of the garden, as well as, to further educate the teachers and students and give them professional horticulture advice to make their jobs that much easier.
The initial startup kit will provide all the equipment, accessories and even the dirt to quickly get started and growing food.
The Real Time Integration of the Garden and the Game
The Classroom Grow Station has been designed to be integrated with the Heroic game. It will have webcams that will stream video into the game. It will have monitoring devices that the students will be able to view in real time. Things that the students do in the game will allow them to do certain things in the classroom, for example if a child gets to a certain level of the agriculture missions in the game, that child will earn the privilege to take home a grow pot and grow produce at home. Other things the students do in the classroom will deliver rewards and privileges in the game.
Teaching Our Students About Healthy Foods
The Heroic Farms will assist the Skills Coaches and teachers in educating students how food is grown, produced, and consumed, one garden at a time.
To succeed, a garden must be well planned and thought out prior to assembling any kind of bed or other system. This is where we shine the most.
All students will be encouraged in the game to complete the Health & Wellness missions and level up through their virtual and real world activities.
Benefits of School Gardens
School Gardens offer many benefits to teachers and to their students that go way beyond the classroom. School Gardens provide the opportunity for students, teachers and members of the community to interact. This interaction may allow for an improvement of interpersonal social skills and can teach students how to work cooperatively with each other and their elders.
Without proper care and maintenance, gardens can die or often become “overgrown”. Giving students the responsibility to water and care for the plants they grow may instill in them a sense of pride and accountability. Patience is another virtue that students may learn through garden participation, as it does take time for the plants to develop into flowers then fruit.
As the garden grows and becomes fruitful and beautiful, students and teachers can take pride in their efforts they put forth. This pride helps to bolster a self-esteem and allow a child to take pride in the beatification of their school, their community and in the sustainability of our planet.
A school garden allows students to work in a non-threatening growing environment where they can interact and learn about nature. Studies find that students who are allowed to learn in an environment such as a garden have helped to improve environmental attitudes. School gardens are a wonderful and exciting way to enhance school subjects and make them more interesting and meaningful to the students. Gardens create an environment that encourages creative thought, acute learning and interpersonal skills. The garden is a living entity that will serve as an excellent resource to teach subjects while allowing students to learn in an environment that is atypical to the sterile classrooms to which they are accustomed to.
The Teachers will not have to teach the lessons as the Heroic game will motivate the students to complete the many different missions that teach the principles of agriculture (a sample curriculum listing is presented at the right).
Where will your Garden Go?
This question is extremely important, as it can determine the success or failure of your garden. We have designed the hydroponic tower and soil garden to fit into a 4’x12’ space in the back of a classroom or in a common area. Together with the growing lights, this provides a year-round garden that can provide fresh produce for the students and their families.
The Hydroponic/Aeroponic/Soil gardens
The integrated garden provides the best initial learning experiences for all types of gardening. As we move forward into the 4th industrial revolution, the food needs of the population will be met by these 3 different types of agriculture.
While for some the costs may be prohibitive to garden in this manner, it is however, the future of farming throughout the world. These methods set your schools’ garden program apart from all the others.
Maintaining a School Garden
Once your garden has been set up, we will help you keep it looking nice and manageable. This is often when teachers let their gardens get “Unmanageable” to the point that they feel that its work, rather than an educational tool. Constant weeding, upkeep and plant feeding will keep your garden from becoming an overwhelming project.
Our Skills Coaches and the motivation the students will get in the game to keep maintaining the garden will take care of these traditional issues with classroom gardens.
The garden has been designed to deliver all the benefits and more, and do it without much effort from the Teachers.
