The final school bell rang on a Friday before a holiday weekend. 

Three days later, a group of 20 local middle school students signed up to be back in the classroom for a weeklong experience learning how to use technology to create optimal conditions for an indoor garden to thrive.

The workshop — a collaboration between UNLV and University of Nevada, Reno Extension — plants the seeds for the middle schoolers' interest in science and technology through activities with a hydroponics  system.

“Hydroponics is a soil-less system for growing plants in a water and nutrient solution,” said Taylor Quiram, a community-based instructor with UNR Extension. “Hydroponic systems are typically used in a controlled environment or indoor setting, so our goal is to introduce students to sensors, microprocessors, and coding tools that can be used to assist in monitoring and adjusting environmental features such as temperature, humidity, lighting, and irrigation.”

“The ultimate goal? To get students more interested in STEM,” said Tricia Braxton,  Extension’s  senior coordinator of partnerships, programs and people engagement. “We’re creating a curriculum that can be used in educational settings.”

A group of three UNLV students and recent grads spanning electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, and sociology piloted five lessons over five days, immersing the middle schoolers in electronic circuit design and data measurement through sensors and basic coding.

“The students learned at their own pace but still supported one another,” said Jillian Perry, a sociology major. She led the lessons with Christian Yuan, a May 2025 electrical engineering grad, and Osjah Ragin, a mechanical engineering master’s student.

Braxton, in partnership with UNLV mechanical engineering professor Brendan O’Toole and Hasan Deniz, director of the Center for Mathematics, Science and Engineering Education at UNLV, developed the framework for the workshop’s first summer cohort and enhanced the garden-based learning of the Youth Horticulture Education Program with STEM concepts.

“We started this curriculum with a blank piece of paper and designed every aspect of the materials that would be needed, the time that would be needed for each lesson,” Braxton said. “We’re making it structured enough but pliable enough to use in any environment.”

The project is one of nine multi-year initiatives funded through a $1.7 million partnership between UNLV and the University of Nevada, Reno Extension to address critical health, social, and environmental challenges affecting communities in Clark County.

STEM Awareness at the Middle School Level

The collaboration was borne from a roundtable three years ago that converged faculty with ideas for informal learning programs for K-12 students.

O’Toole, who has had a longstanding interest in youth education through community workshops submitted a proposal to fund the College of Engineering’s FIRST Robotics mentoring program. Deniz and Braxton submitted other proposals.

But the pool of funds available was limited.

“The interesting thing is that they said: ‘Alright, we like all these proposals. But we want you to figure out a way to work together and come up with one, unifying proposal,’” O’Toole recalled, adding that they received about $140,000 to make the workshop, and ultimately, the STEM-hydroponics curriculum, a reality.

“We’ve got five or six lessons now that are pretty good; this is our second pilot. We offered the workshop last fall as a Saturday morning program, and we’ve refined the lessons between then and now.”

They also think they achieved the right mix of participants — some with prior coding and Arduino kit building experience and others applying the concepts for the first time.

“We wanted to bring more awareness to the middle school level so that by the time they get to high school, they’ll have a sense of what they’re interest is as opposed to waiting until after graduating from high school even, and getting into college,” Braxton said. “This is the awareness that’s needed early on.”

While middle school was the target age for the curriculum, the team will also test out the curriculum for high schoolers June 23-July 18 during the C.O.O.L. (Community. Outreach. Opportunity. Leadership.) Summer Program at Clark High School. 

“I think our last step is to bring in a couple educators to see what we’ve done and to see what their input would be,” O’Toole said.

The grade the team received from the student participants? An A+.

“The instructions are easy to understand, and the exercises are fun but also very educational. There’s a lot of hands-on activities,” said Kimberly Inidiveri, a rising 9th grader at the Coral Academy of Science. “It’s my first time working with hydroponics and STEM."