Life Planters represents a group of passionate youths who envision a world of self-sustaining communities accomplished through ground-up urban farming movement. We employ a dual approach of education and capability development to engage and empower communities. Our overarching objectives are:
- Believe that growing our own food enhances our food security, living environment and health
- Build know-how of growing food crops and harnessing available technology to help ourselves
- Connect food growers together to form a supportive network
Three workshops on Personal Food Computer (PFC) technology were conducted for 20 participants from Trybe Community Rehabilitation Centre, whose mission is to immerse residents in a relationship-driven, Transformational Environment to lead a purposeful and drug–free life.
About PFCs
The term is coined by Caleb Harper and team from MIT Media Lab who are spearheading the Open Agriculture Initiative (OpenAg; http://openag.media.mit.edu/education/). It is a table top controlled-environment agriculture technology platform that uses robotic systems to monitor and control climate, energy and plant growth inside specialised growing chambers. Every time users grow and harvest, they will contribute to a library of climate recipes that can be access by other users around the world.
Inspired by OpenAg, the team adapted their work into our local context and challenged the residents at the rehab centre to build their very own PFC with the following objectives:
1. Engage, educate and empower youth-at-risk through technology-driven urban farming
2. Broaden the youths’ perspectives in the context of food security challenges and how their efforts can help themselves and their environment.
3. Be the first in Singapore to build a Personal Food Computer and have us listed on the map on MIT Media Lab Open Agriculture (‘OpenAg’) Initiative.
The Highlights
Hands-on learning
A key focus for both the team and participants is to engage all of our senses to create a holistic learning journey. As such, most of our coursework are about tinkering towards a tangible result. We were able to engage the participants through our hands-on workshops and for most, it was also their first time experiencing the world of programming. Our adaption of Ardublock, a clean graphical user interface, for our introductory programming lesson was a good call as it aided their understanding of programming concepts. From feedback received, 91% of our participants found our workshop interesting and 83% of them look forward to attend our upcoming 3D printing workshop.
Engaging, Educating, Empowering
We have achieved our first objective of engaging, educating and empowering the youths through technology-driven urban farming platform and are excited to conduct more follow-up to build up the participants’ skill sets and continue to guide their learning process for a lasting impact. Feedback from the Trybe staff members has been positive and they recognise the value of our work. We have also gained insights of the participants and built some rapport with them. This will help us in our upcoming activities to achieve a deeper impact. It is our hope that our series of workshops would be a transformational learning process for our participants.
The Memories
Reflection #1 – The Challenges
The workshop didn’t go as expected!
We had done most of the preparations beforehand (i.e. soldering, cutting of boards, drilling) in the interest of time. However, these technical aspects could be included in the classroom activities too. Also, we were unable to use the laptops provided by CRC as we did not send to them the required software earlier for pre-setup.
Most of the seeds failed to grow as they were of poor quality. We did test them before and had no issues growing them up. However, our test was not robust. No detailed recording of the growth rate was done and it was conducted months prior to the event. Other micro-controller projects with more competitive value such as sumo bots or robo-soccer should be explored for future workshops to make the learning process more entertaining.
Reflection #2 – The Takeaways
Learning from past experience
After the first workshop, the team looked into making sure that the centre’s laptops worked for the next session and IT staff was available to assist us in getting access to the various websites we would like the participants to explore. It was heartening to see the participants being intrigued and deeply engrossed in the projects others have done and executed their presentations with flair. Soldering our own circuit board proved to be an unwise decision as it drained too much of our time. We should stick to breadboard and/or get our Printed Circuit Board (PCB) out in time for the lesson.
Planning ahead
Given the chance to implement this project again, we will start the planning phase earlier so that we can have more lead time and get everything settled with, hopefully, minimal problems before the start of the event. This would allow us to request for corporate sponsorship before the end of the financial year which will ease the fund raising process. By starting early, we also can have ample time to react to unforeseen situation. Due to time limitation, we have yet to achieve our second objective of being the first in Singapore to build a Personal Food Computer and have us listed on the map on MIT Media Lab Open Agriculture (‘OpenAg’) Initiative. To this end, we will keep working on it.
Acknowledgement
Thank you to Kwek Leng Joo CoLab4Good Fund and OG Department Stores – Mr Tay Tee Peng for giving us the opportunity to plan and execute various community project ideas under Life Planters. Without this support, Life Planters would not have started and reached out to the people we had thus far.
We would like to thank Trybe for their support and advice in our Personal Food Computer Workshop for the residents at Community Rehabilitation Centre in order to engage and empower them effectively. Thank you to William Hooi from Espert Pte Ltd for the sponsorship of five Espresso Lite microcontrollers for the workshop.
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