Inspiring Students. Building STEM Skills.
BioSTEM has been developed to inspire students (largely senior, but also middle and early years) to learn more about plant science and its importance in the world. It accomplishes this by allowing teachers and students to do more authentic research in the classroom using lab-grade plant growth technology, and to advance beyond rudimentary windowsill and countertop growing in the process. Additionally, we believe BioSTEM also offers a superior vehicle for STEM skills development overall, through the experiential hands-on learning it affords as students tend to their experiments and research on living things over time.
From an education perspective what's behind this is our fundamental belief that the understanding of plants and the translation of this into field-based solutions is at the very heart of the world’s production of food, medicine, shelter, clothing, fibre and renewable energy... and has been under-taught in our schools for years with biology largely being instructed through animal science. We believe that plant science also holds the key to helping solve many of the global issues we face as a planet related to climate change and its most drastic effects, making its renaissance in schools even more relevant and timely.
BioSTEM helps facilitate the advanced study of this venerable and vital science in schools while enhancing STEM education, by combining the Conviron GEN1000 reach-in plant growth chamber with a ground-breaking, companion educational web site that supports, expands and enriches the classroom experience with a wide range of collaborative resources. It is a dual offering.
As a result, BioSTEM provides teachers with a powerful new instructional tool in the classroom and students with a new technology inspiration to stimulate learning, and it gives both of them an international online community of fellow BioSTEM enthusiasts to mutually interact with as well. BioSTEM can be employed to help teach mandated course material in subjects including biology, ecology, genetics, and the environment, including ecosystems, soil and water, as well as food and water security. It can be effective across multiple grades and courses for class-set experiments, as well as student-driven research.
We believe that through the enhanced study of plant science in schools BioSTEM can assist teachers, dramatically raise student awareness, and accelerate the development of their STEM skills through superior hands-on learning. We also believe it can inspire more of the best and brightest to pursue post-secondary studies and careers in the field, and enlighten new generations to be more conscious of the importance of public policy debate related to our food and water security, and the care of our environment.
Curriculum Applications
The BioSTEM Program allows for wide variations of repeatable class-set experiments to be conducted across multiple grades and courses (eliminating faculty silos), but most importantly it stimulates and accommodates student-driven inquiry, research and critical thinking which schools, especially STEM progressive schools, highly value today. For instance, labs would include variations on the general growth and observation of plants; determining the effect of environmental factors on the growth of plants; artificial selection; Mendelian genetics and heredity: farm to table programming; and multiple other experiments and research applications varying in type and length and designed to work with established curriculum and within the time constraints of the standard semester structure.
STEM Progressive Education
The chamber’s physical capacity allows it to be used by different classes at the same time offering significant utility in the process. It can also accommodate different grades of students in the same manner, and every year as students move through their courses, the chamber can be accessed, and programming applied in increasingly challenging and informative manners – including multiple STEM applications - all the way through to graduation.
School piloting has shown that this new technology and programming in the classroom also makes students feel like real plant scientists, enhances their STEM engagement, shows them what a research career in the field might be like, and can help set the stage for many to go on to post-secondary studies in science, technology, engineering and math.