Earth Day Issues Are Year-Round Focus For STEM Program Students At Edison High School

FRANCONIA, VA — Students at Thomas A. Edison High School are getting a chance to focus on critical environmental issues, including studying ways to create a more eco-friendly society, through the school’s Global STEM Challenges Program.

The Global STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) Challenges Program lets students at the Fairfax County high school study sustainability year-round, not just in the spring around Earth Day. This year, Earth Day will be celebrated on Saturday, April 22.

Freshman participants in the Global STEM Challenges Program at Edison High School study food access and agricultural issues, while tenth-graders look at clean water issues, and eleventh-graders study new forms of sustainable energy.

The current group of freshman students in the program are exploring the benefits of growing vertical gardens in urban areas and whether insects can become a more sustainable source of protein.

For their research on the protein-rich possibilities of insects as food, the Edison High School students found an unused vertical file cabinet in a Fairfax County Public Schools storage warehouse and turned it into a bug incubator.

“If you know where to look, there are plenty of recipes to be had using black soldier fly larvae; we’ll be starting with cookies,” Layla, a freshman at Edison High School, told FCPS.

The students hope to recruit a group of fellow students to test the taste of the bug cookies and see if they can tell the difference between regular cookies and the ones made with the larvae.

“Current methods of food production — cows, sheep and pigs — take up a lot of resources,” Arcadia, another student at Edison High School, said. “This has the potential to be a lot cheaper, and it’s also quite high in protein.”

By using an old file cabinet as their insect incubator, the freshmen students are incorporating the tenets of the Global STEM Challenges Program, including using existing material. The unused file cabinet, which also doesn't take up much floor space at the school, has been transformed into a home for black soldier flies. The students plan to use their larvae as a more environmentally friendly food source.

Students enrolled in the Global STEM Program are part of a cohort that operates as a smaller learning community within Edison High School. They meet for three-period blocks every other day. The students approach problems holistically, in a real-world context, where different aspects of each discipline are interwoven and highly connected.

“In a traditional classroom, things are very prescribed, you teach a set of circumstances and students are tested on their understanding," lead Global STEM Challenges Program teacher Chris Kniesly told FCPS. "Our goal is to teach students to break the mold in thinking about critical issues for our society and our planet."

Global STEM Challenge Program students take math, science and engineering classes, with a focus on collaboration and critical thinking, skills that are important in tackling major environmental issues facing Fairfax County and the world beyond.

The Global STEM Challenge Program has a maximum capacity of 90 spaces for each of the three grade levels. The program is filled by students zoned for Edison High School on a first-come, first-served basis. If there are remaining spaces available, students who are not zoned for Edison High School are enrolled based on the order in which transfer applications were submitted.

In the current program, a group of freshmen students is looking at agricultural options inside apartment buildings as a way to reduce the use of fossil fuels when transporting foods grown in other parts of the country or importing food from other countries.

A vertical garden created by a student group is intended to conserve both space and water. The students found discarded items at Edison High School — wood from pallets used to deliver food and old milk cartons — to create their vertical farming structure to grow radishes and recirculate water between the various plants.

When their projects are finished, the Global STEM Challenge program participants will be asked to present their solutions to their classmates, teachers and community members.

Aydin, a freshman at Edison, told FCPS that the real-world applications of the Global STEM Challenges program are what attracted him to the course.

“I signed up because I thought it would be cool to try a new way of school, instead of just textbooks and math equations, we apply knowledge to real life problems and scenarios,” Aydin said.