Greenhouse grant
Sturgeon preschool students and seniors have teamed up to grow a future together in a brand new greenhouse in Legal.
Homeland Housing and Sturgeon Public School officials will hold the grand opening of the Chateau Sturgeon Lodge Greenhouse in Legal on Thursday. The roughly $10,000 greenhouse was built with support from Homeland and a federal grant.
Sturgeon Public runs a preschool program called Headstart for kids who need developmental support, explained trustee Liz Kohle, whose ward includes Legal. The board needed space two years ago for its Headstart kids in Legal, so it partnered with Homeland to run the class at the Chateau Sturgeon seniors’ lodge.
Many kids today don’t have grandparents they can connect with, said Homeland CEO Raymond Cormie. This arrangement lets youths do art, read stories, and play games with seniors at the lodge, giving them role models and giving the seniors a way to socialize and give back to their community. (Headstart students work with seniors throughout the county, but the Legal class is the only one that operates out of a seniors’ lodge, Kohle said.)
Kohle said at some point teachers and staff at the lodge realized that kids like growing things and seniors like gardening. That led to the idea of building a greenhouse run by kids and seniors at the Legal lodge.
“It’s just a natural fit for kids and seniors to be plunking around in the dirt,” Kohle said.
The 12-by-12-foot greenhouse was up and running in the lodge’s courtyard earlier this month, Cormie said. About 10 students and six seniors are now tending to the crops. Radishes should be ready by the end of the month, and there could be potatoes by this fall.
Lodge resident Dorothy de Champlain said she and her fellow seniors have been teaching the kids how to plant, water, and monitor the crops, and the kids seem to enjoy it.
“I’ve been gardening all my life, and since I’m here I don’t have a garden. (This) helps me bring back memories of what I was doing at home.”
The ribbon-cutting ceremony is at 6:30 p.m. on Thursday, June 20 and will be followed by a tour. Call Sturgeon Schools at 780-939-4341 for details.
Trashbot rising
A Sturgeon Composite teacher plans to rally students this fall to build a trash-hunting robot.
The Association of Professional Engineers and Geoscientists of Alberta announced June 13 that Sturgeon Composite High teacher Kevin Hubick had won a $5,000 APEGA Innovation in Education Award. The award backs innovative classroom projects that promote knowledge of science, technology, engineering and math.
Hubick, the head of math and computing science at Sturgeon Composite, said he has a lot of students who can build toy-like robots that can navigate halls or do other tricks, but that many want to make something more ambitious.
“They wanted to build something real, something big.”
Hubick plans to challenge these students to build something even NASA would have trouble with: an autonomous robot that can safely navigate parks and alleyways to pick up hazardous waste such as used syringes.
“This is kind of an industrial version of a Roomba,” he said, and there’s nothing like it on the market today.
“This is not going to be easy, and there’s no quick answers, but that’s OK, because that’s where true learning begins.”
Hubick said the final robot, which the school hopes to field within a year, would likely use laser-radar to navigate and be based on the Mars Rover’s chassis. Art and welding students will build the frame, while computing and robotic students will design and program the arms and sensors. The cash from the award will help cover the cost to build the robot.
When asked (sarcastically) if the students shouldn’t start with something easier, like, say, a moon base, Hubick said he actually used John F. Kennedy’s “we choose to go to the moon” speech when he pitched this project to APEGA – it’s a very tough challenge, but that’s intentional.
“I want to push my students so they do something beyond what they think they can do.”
