Hillel Day School

The garden’s goal is to teach students the importance of growing their own food and eating locally grown food for the purposes of conservation, elimination of poverty and energy efficiency. The open-source design we implement will be instructional, to share the idea that even in constrained settings, one can build a functioning four-season greenhouse and give prosperity away. Nothing matters more to a kid than food, and food is the connective tissue between our daily life and the future of innovation, such as feeding the next generation of astronauts on a space station.

This grant will allow us to do the art and the science of gardening. We will create ecosystems, set up hydroponics, and use sensors to collect data on oxygen, carbon dioxide, sunlight and moisture, which will be uploaded to student laptops, where they will conduct experiments and manipulate data for the purpose of doing relevant science they can eat.