Millennium Scholars: UV Light

The UV Light program was a huge success. The Millennium Scholars were a great group of kids that had phenomenal questions about the Russel E. Larson Agricultural Research Farms and just agriculture in general. After talking with some of the students, a lot of them had no agricultural background at all but they were all super engaging and wanted to learn. The UV lights with the beads were a lot of fun; the students were super engaged and wanted to learn more about how the plastic makes a difference. They were asking great questions to Kathy about not only how the plastic blocks UV light but also looking at the bigger picture and looking at how the high tunnels work. 

In UV Blocking Plastic

Full UV Light 

Putting a teaching hat on, I really liked how the program worked but there are some changes that could be made to make the whole program better. The biggest was more time. I think we needed more time for discussion at the end. We were tight on time due to the introductions being longer then expected. The introductions were great but gave less time to the program. Because of that we had to shorten the rotation times between each high tunnel. But we learned that we did not need as much time in each high tunnel as we first expected. We also ran into the problem that there wasn’t enough time to record everyone’s data fast enough. With this activity, there’s a lot of data that requires a lot of time to retrieve it from everyone. Also referring to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, it was very sunny and hard to find the right angle at the end where everyone was out of the sun. We were are staring into the beating sun which made people uncomfortable. We could have had even more participation if the conditions were better. 

To do this program again, we need at minimum 2 hours dedicated fully to this. The introduction portion by Kathy was great and sparked a lot of cool ideas. If we can take those ideas, and move them along into the research and collecting data, some of those questions will be answered. The other important part will be to make sure there is enough time for more in-depth discussions at the end. A part of that being is selecting the right spaces for everyone to come together and share data. That could really help bring this whole activity home for students to really help them answer the why behind all of this research. It was super great to be a part of this and have the opportunity to watch a program be a success!