Understanding the pH Scale
This is a Design Challenge for Understanding the pH Scale. In this design challenge we will create Universal Indicator from red cabbage Anthocyanin. Then we will test seven different materials.
Design Challenge: Mastering Public Speaking
This design challenge will ask teams to explore the nature of matter and energy. We do this by disassembling matter into energy from the ecology to energy and every step in between. This is important because to reframe what we are exploring here at Mezzacello Urban Farm, It’s good to know what size or scale you are at!
Design Challenge: Levels of Reality
This design challenge will ask teams to explore the nature of matter and energy. We do this by disassembling matter into energy from the ecology to energy and every step in between. This is important because to reframe what we are exploring here at Mezzacello Urban Farm, It’s good to know what size or scale you are at!
Design Challenge: Build a Bridge
This design challenge will ask teams to Build a Bridge for a specific animal with the fewst parts and the maximum amount of strength. The design challenge will allow each team materials and fasteners to build a prototype bridge and test a specific weight that is a proxy for an animal at Mezzacello Urban Farm. The final test will include a test involving a live animal.
Design Challenge: Build a Biodome
This design challenge will explore the way DNA and RNA code for the building of complex proteins and elegant structures witha minimum of information. The result will be a biodome that will allow animals and plants to live safe from predators and prey.
Design Challenge: Simple Machines and You
This design challenge will explore the way we use simple machines on an urban farm. The students will each begiven a simple device that is a closed box. Each team will get a different box and they will be given 10 minutes to assemble the device. The fastest team wins.
Design Challenge: Fun With Food
This design challenge will explore the way we use the natural resources at Mezzacello to feed and care for our livestock when we can. We will be cexploring metabolic loads and nutrition profiles for four different species of animal and creating appropriate feed.
Design Challenge: Fertilizer
This design challenge will explore the physical aspects of NHCOPS. Nitrogen is key here, as is Phosphus and sulphur. We will be building the main fertilizer used at Mezzacello. Eden's Ghost.
Design Challenge: Water Sterilization
This design challenges explores how we steralize purified water to ensure safety. This design challenge is intended to extend the water purification design challenge.
Design Challenge: Water Purification
This design challenges explores three routes to collecting, cleaning, and purifying water for human and animal consumption. The three routes will include mechanical filtration, filtration and heating, and using filtration with activated charcoal.
Design Challenge: Physical Electricity
In this design challenge we will explore the basic nature of electricity and how we interact with it on an urban farm. From the low voltages of organics, to the higher voltages and amps of electronics, we will explore it all. The deliverable will be a battery, a solar panel, and the wiring that unites them.
Design Challenge: Ecospheres
In this Design Challenge: Ecospheres we will explore the complex relationships between atoms, molecules, cycles, solutions, pressure, location in the environment, and the electrical potential that unites them all. We we will create the attributes and conditions required for each NHCOPS element to cycle through our environment. We will discover synergies and how these systems work together to create conditions we need for life on this planet.
Design Challenge: Making Feed On a Farm
My intern, Marcus, and I are developing a design challenge for Columbus City Schools around how we engineer feed here at Mezzacello. Using feed sources like oats, wheat germ, timothy hay, syrup, and cracked corn, we add other proteins, grasses and seeds grown here at Mezzacello like sunflower seeds, crickets, mealworms, and eggs. But our secret ingredient is edible weeds.
Another Generation of Generators
My 2024/2025 CAHS intern working on a design challenge to help students better understand physical electricity. Here they are ready to install wind power, solar power and an electrical load.
Metro High School 2024 Intern
This is my Metro Intern for 2024. Their capstone was to design a series of three design challenges that focus on ecology, quantume effects, and biomechancs. They rocked it.
Workshop: Partners not Pets
This workshop looks at the way humans, animals, and ecosytems interact with Applied STEM and engineering.
Workshop: BioEngineering Basics
This workshop looks at the way simple machines interact with materials in the natural world. Applied STEM and engineering.
Design Challenge: Reframe a Problem
In this design challenge we pretend to be encountering an elephant blind. How does the way we look at a problem change us?
Design Challenge: Mastering Fear
In this design challenge we explore the intersections of time, biology, emotion, and courage by creating an emotion hourglass.