The Giving Tree is a collaborative educational project concerning the design and prototyping of an hydroponics system for the classroom.
I joined up with Niko Arranz, Levi Baeten, River Diephuis, Gino Martina & Jurgen Meijer to collaborate on a design for an hydroponics system in the classroom. We as a group decided that we wanted to help children understand the complexity and fun one can have in growing one’s own food.
We worked on many prototypes in order to finally come up with an easily expandable and relatively modular system that could be built without much difficulty or danger in the classroom.
My own personal contribution was to research, conceptualize and design a workshop manual for the system to be implemented in class. This meant doing significant theoretical research into psychology, child development and child-classroom interaction models so as to formulate a worskhop manual.
The eventual model was constructed and tested in a classroom. We are in the process of testing it with children as well.
We also made models and renderings in Solidworks.
2017
Nikki Vieler 