Growing For The Future With Year 7
8th June 22
Year 7 students have become farmers as part of their Interdisciplinary Enquiry (IE) topic this term.
They have been tasked with answering the question: How do we feed an overpopulated world? As part of their investigations they have been growing pea shoots under varying conditions to work out how to get the best crops.
Student Omar explained to us what they’ve been up to:
“We have already grown a batch of pea shoots trying out different variables of soil, sand, clay, and different positionings of the peas in the soil.
We have taken what we learned from the first survey about which combinations were most successful and what didn’t work and now we’re doing it again using that info to try and increase crop weight.
We found that a mixture of humus and top soil and putting the peas quite far down in the growing material gave us the most mass.
The plan once we’ve grown the pea shoots is to sell them to Rhys, the head chef here at KAS and to give the money to a charity, possibly a food bank or something relevant to the topic.
I’ve found this IE really good because I’m interested in gardening and I enjoy it. We’ve had to work in teams of three which can be good, but can also be difficult, you have to learn how to work with different types of people.”
The IE brings together Science, Maths and Design in a hands-on learning experience with real-world applications. They’ve been using maths to work with the data their experiments are producing, in Design they are building wooden planters to grow their final crops and Biology and the life cycle of plants underpins it all.
