GROWING OUR EDUCATOR NETWORK
Interested in integrating Project Feed 1010 curriculum and/or aquaponics into your classroom or education program? Since 2015, we’ve partnered with science educators around the world to increase engagement, content retention, and critical thinking skills in their various audiences – whether they be students, citizen scientists or lifelong learners! Typically, these incredible educators integrate Project Feed 1010’s Food Security curriculum into their classroom, engineer aquaponic systems, and participate in a nation-wide citizen science project to advance aquaponic research at Institute for Systems Biology.
Many of the educators collaborating with Project Feed 1010.
Through the use of our scientist‐educator network, we have collected data from over 200 aquaponic systems around the world through our web-based data management hub. Additionally, we have developed and disseminated transformative STEM curricula related to real world, complex issues such as climate change, food security, and environmental sustainability. Our preliminary work demonstrates that a scientist‐educator network creates exciting professional development opportunities for teacher leaders, while driving a nationwide, sustainable and systemic change in high school STEM education.
This effort will boost leadership skills of teacher leaders and make them proficient in furthering their influence in diverse ways:
- The teacher leaders will gain first‐hand experience in developing and executing a strategy to recruit and establish researchers and educators into a crowdsourced network.
- They will directly participate in developing and utilizing a social network and web‐based infrastructure required for coordinating the crowdsourced network.
- The teachers will learn how to activate the crowdsourced network to take scientific advancements and their research experiences from laboratory to classroom ‐‐ complete with hands‐on activities, evaluation plans, and professional development and teaching aids.
- The cross‐disciplinary nature of the crowdsourced project will offer the teachers a platform and a mechanism to move out of their professional confines and into the state and national arenas.
Similarly, students also stand to gain enormously from this effort. They will learn to work in cross‐disciplinary teams, and become an integral part of the solution to real‐world issues that builds on social networking and distributed learning. The students will get hands‐on experience in sustainable agriculture while receiving cross‐disciplinary training across all disciplines of STEM. The crowd-sourced model will allow students across the world to compare, contrast, and discuss their results and experience first‐hand the scientific process. This will cultivate critical thinking skills in the context of a real world complex issue of food security. We expect that the students will close the achievement gap to directly participate in the work force, thereby addressing the projected 47% unemployment crisis due to automation and technological advancement. Entrepreneurial students will have the opportunity to participate in developing a new industry in the sustainable agriculture sector, thus creating new employment opportunities, and directly contributing back to the crowdsourced research machine. It is noteworthy that this is a prototypical feedforward loop that will drive systemic change towards sustainable agriculture.
Explore our network of citizen scientists
Success Stories
“PF1010 definitely made me more aware of the issue of food security around the world. The project made me really glad to have chosen a globally-focused major, and made me want to focus more on the environment in relation to health when it comes to a potential career.” – 2017 High School Student
“Project Feed 1010 gave me exposure to interdisciplinary research. Since the program, I have gone on to intern at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, combining my computer science skill set with atmospheric spectroscopy and interdisciplinary planetary science research.” – 2016 PF1010 Ambassador Laura Hu
DonorsChoose.org is an organization that directly connects teachers and donors. Especially in high-need communities, DonorsChoose provides a way for teachers to fund projects for their classrooms. Here are success stories of teachers who had their aquaponics projects fully funded. This could be you!
Tami Caraballo – Washington
Tami Caraballo – Washington – Year 2
Jennifer Barreto – Florida – Year
Congratulations to Kathy Roberts and her students at Palm Beach Gardens High School for being awarded the 1st place prize in the FBLA Global Challenge Initiative with this video and their partnership with students in Panama! She found a way to incorporate Project Feed 1010 into her classroom and impact students across the world! See her spotlight blog post for more information.
