Engineering Commons^™

Reducing Food Scarcity: The Benefits Of Urban Farming, S.A. Claudell, Emilio Mejia

Journal of Nonprofit Innovation

Urban farming can enhance the lives of communities and help reduce food scarcity. This paper presents a conceptual prototype of an efficient urban farming community that can be scaled for a single apartment building or an entire community across all global geoeconomics regions, including densely populated cities and rural, developing towns and communities. When deployed in coordination with smart crop choices, local farm support, and efficient transportation then the result isn’t just sustainability, but also increasing fresh produce accessibility, optimizing nutritional value, eliminating the use of ‘forever chemicals’, reducing transportation costs, and fostering global environmental benefits.

Imagine Doris, who is …

Challenge-Based Learning & Steam Curriculum, Diana Lockwood

The STEAM Journal

STEAM education is being integrated into elementary schools as a way to engage more students in creativity, hands-on learning, and problem-based learning also referred to as Challenge-Based-Learning (CBL). This article focuses on elementary educators’ curriculum design for STEAM and presenting students with open-ended questions phrased as a challenge as a way to raise student interest and achievement (DeJarnette, 2018; Hunter-Doniger, 2018). When students received challenges to solve, they felt more open to sharing their ideas since there was more than one potential right answer (DeJarnette, 2018; Drake, 2012). When implementing CBL, teachers act as facilitators using a constructivist approach as …