The journey to our newly created AgTech Lab at the high school has spanned over nearly a decade. What started out as a simple DIY setup in the back of a middle school science lab, has now become a one of a kind research space. STEM is now viewed through the lens of controlled environment agriculture, or CEA. This state-of-the-art indoor farm hosts our high school engineering classes and is the home to our middle school STEM enrichment program. The site also allows for independent research projects and lab extensions for all students and teachers to leverage.

The AgTech lab goes beyond a simple introduction to indoor farming. Students are able to leverage computer science and environmental robotics to design and implement automated monitoring systems that allows the crops to be fully cared for 24/7/365. The two vertical NFT towers that sit in the heart of the space serve as the farm’s production units. Students take what they learn in the lab and bring it to scale. The lab is capable of produces 250 heads of leafy greens every three weeks. There is so much food production that comes from the lab that Half Hollow Hills has partnered with Island Harvest, a local food bank. The food grown in the AgTech lab is donated into our community to help those struggling with food insecurity. We are also looking to upstart a Farm to School program in which some of the food served in our cafeteria will have been grown and harvested right down the hall from where it is being consumed.

Engineering students at High School East take part in the NASA HUNCH Design and Prototyping program. Much of their work is supported by funding from the New York State Space Grant Consortium. Half Hollow Hills is proud to be one of only two K-12 affiliate members in NY State.

NASA HUNCH (High Schools United with NASA to Create Hardware) is a nationally recognized workforce development program with a 23-year legacy of preparing the next generation of innovators and leaders.

Through immersive Workforce project-based learning, high school students gain hands-on experience by designing and fabricating real-world products that are valued and utilized by NASA engineers and astronauts.

NASA HUNCH empowers students to develop essential 21st-century skills—such as critical thinking, collaboration, and technical expertise—by tackling authentic challenges sourced directly from NASA’s ongoing missions.

Students work side-by-side with NASA professionals, contributing to solutions for the International Space Station (ISS) and supporting NASA’s bold Moon to Mars Initiative, ensuring their work has a direct impact on the future of space exploration.

With a strong historical link to the ISS and a forward-looking focus on Artemis and Moon to Mars, NASA HUNCH offers students a unique opportunity to launch their careers while making meaningful contributions to NASA’s most ambitious projects.

Half Hollow Hills is proud to have had multiple teams selected as finalists to present their work to NASA astronauts on the floor of the Saturn V Rocket room at Johnson Space Center.

We have started yet another fantastic STEM opportunity for middle school students in Half Hollow Hills. 2024 saw the launch of our middle school STEM enrichment program. 8th grade students throughout the district were able to apply into a program that was designed to expand the tool belt of incoming high school students. Topics ranging from scientific computing to electronics to best research practices are covered through the lens of controlled environment agriculture. For their part, students then engage in an authentic research experience that they then present as part of the Growing Beyond Earth spring symposium.

In addition to the local independent research being conducted by students, Half Hollow Hills has also been a part of the Growing Beyond Earth program for over half a decade.

This is a joint venture between Fairchild Botanical Gardens and NASA in which we study and monitor the success of various edible cultivars to be grown on the International Space Station. Students make weekly observations related to general plant health and crop yield for plants being grown in an experimental growing medium that minimizes the water needs as these plants mature in the system.

It wouldn’t be the AgTech lab without finding a way to automate the care of these plants as well. We have customized the GBE growing units to harvest environmental data as well as adjust watering and ventilation regimens based on user defined set points. What started as a single, manually cared for unit is now a fleet of six, fully autonomous research vessels.

This is yet another endeavor that student engineers have been pursuing in our classrooms for the better part of a decade. This started early on by introducing Arduino and Raspberry Pi to enhance middle school science labs. We then began incorporating simple monitoring and control systems into our DIY growing systems. Some students even went on to develop passion projects that won them competitions and got them published in magazines.

What students are working on now is at the bleeding edge of the future of food production. Within our large scale food production units, students are working to optimize the production of our crops while minimizing the amount of time we need to spend doing it. The NASA Space Grant Consortium has supported us in bringing in industry grade equipment to monitor our systems. This has expanded the programming horizons for students to include computer vision and AI.

Students spent time during their lunch periods in West Hollow’s maker space assembling the various systems that comprise our FarmBot. This CNC farming robot is in charge of maintaining a raised bed community garden in the atrium of our school. This nearly 100 square foot garden is seeded, watered, weeded, and monitored by coding sequences written by student engineers. In addition to allowing our students to engage in problem solving and computational thinking, the produce that is harvested from this garden throughout the school year will be donated to Island Harvest food bank in an attempt to reach out to community members struggling with food insecurity.

As part of a grant from the American Libraries Association, West Hollow students took part in an evening of coding and problem solving in our first annual “Code with Your Kids". Students, parents, and siblings worked as collaborative teams to construct simple input/output systems and wrote basic code in C++ to meet challenge criteria. The next iteration of the project will involve Raspberry Pi and the python coding language.

One of our early goals when trying to broaden the scope of the student experience was to ensure a sense of global citizenship. Engineering is a team sport. That includes teams that span international borders. From China, to Mexico, to the UK, our students have worked alongside peers from a multitude of backgrounds. The goal has been not only to share our knowledge, but our culture with one another.