Module 3: Flourish

We know that plants need light, water, and air to grow. But achieving the perfect balance of these things will help them flourish. To help you grow the ultimate crop and adapt your growing environment, we’ll follow a problem-solving process that engineers use to solve problems in a creative way.

The 4 Ds of Design Thinking:

Engineers go back and forth between the steps until they find the best solution. This is called iterative thinking.

Let’s unpack the first D, discover.

The discovery stage is about defining the problem, and then exploring the best ways to tackle it.

The problem we’re tackling is: ‘I wonder how to grow food sustainably?’

Often, you can find inspiration from other STEM innovators who have found solutions to similar problems. Let’s discover together how innovators around the world are using technology to improve their crops and grow food in places we’ve never grown food before.

Build your grow house

Now you’ve seen you can grow microgreens whatever the weather, all year round! It doesn’t matter if you live in Antarctica or the Sahara Desert. But to ensure their speedy and consistent growth, you’ll need to create a controlled environment.

An easy way to do this is by building a grow house which provides protection, light and a constant temperature for growing plants.

There are heaps of benefits to using a grow house. Different plants thrive in different climates and weather conditions. So, by controlling the environmental conditions in a grow house, you can trick plants into growing all year round.

It also means you can garden in any weather, conserve energy sources (like water), your crops are protected from pests, and they don’t get blasted with bad weather.

Your rōpū is going to build a grow house for your first trial to help your microgreens thrive.

Time to move in

Your seedlings have now been germinating for around 3 – 7 days so let’s let the light in and transfer into your new grow house. Make some observations before and after you add your grow house – did your leaves change colour? Are the stems standing straighter? How quickly did your plants change?

Let’s grow

Hopefully by now your first microgreen trial has sprouted some tasty green morsels. But there’s always room for improvement. Is there a way to make your crop bigger and better?

Testing your growing method by running different trials is a great way to work out what will help your plants thrive. This will also help you work out the best way to grow a farm of the future!

Set up your second trial and make some changes to improve growth.

You’ll be collecting daily data for trial two just like you did for trial one. Go back to Lab 2.2 to record your findings.

Nutrients

So far, your microgreens have been feeding off a mix of light, water and air to grow. You can boost this even further by adding a nutrient mix to your crop.

Tools down! Today you:

• Started unpacking the 4 Ds of Design Thinking
• Built your first grow house
• Planted your second microgreen trial
• Brewed your compost nutrient solution