Coleman Middle School received a grant this year with the intention of using AI within the building. They used the money to introduce grow towers in classrooms throughout the building.
“Grow towers are intended to use hydroponics and artificial lighting in order to grow plants within the classroom so that we can have indoor plants for students to interact with,” district AI specialist Katelyn Schoenhofer said.
Schoenhofer says they can utilize AI to implement grow towers into every subject and to help differentiate their curriculum requirements to the needs of their students.
“They have a thought experiment or exercise with this Copilot agent, saying, ‘here are my standards, here’s what I’m teaching, here’s what type of technology I have. Here are some of my students’ needs,’” Schoenhofer said. “Because maybe I have students that are gifted, maybe I have students that need kinesthetic learning, and maybe I have visual learners or auditory learners. So how can I meet the needs of all of my students while using a grow tower?”
“I look at plants differently than I used to, because when we first became an environmental magnet, I didn’t feel like I could grow anything,” art teacher Erin Comer said. “And I went from one plant to 21 by the end of that year, and then I’ve just been growing my plant collection ever since then. And so I applied for the grant with the idea that I wanted to see how students’ behavior and interactions with the plants, the psychology behind growing could be linked to their growth and see if it had anything to do with each other. And so I wanted to take a different approach and also be able to draw different things that grow in the tower.”
Because Coleman Middle School became an environmental magnet only a few years ago, district leaders and school administrators looked for ways to incorporate AI into classrooms while maintaining the environmental focus.
“The kids that sit near it seem to love being there,” Comer said. “They’ll ask me about the different plants that are growing, and they want to know which ones are edible.”
Students say the interactive nature of the towers makes learning more meaningful.
“I absolutely love it in my classroom,” eighth grader Piper Khan said. “When we need to feed the reptiles, we can just go over to the grow tower and take some of the plants.”
“In the Nature Champions classroom, we use some of the plants to feed the reptiles, and we sometimes use them, like, for outdoors and stuff, and it teaches us how to support plants and maintain plants,” eighth grader Chloe Bathgate said.
As AI continues to expand into daily life, Schoenhofer says it is critical to teach students how to use it responsibly.
“We have to prepare our teachers and our students to think about the appropriate ways to use it without it becoming a cognitive offload for students,” she said. “We don’t want it to be where students quit learning and use it as an easy button to not do their work. So that starts with our teachers being educated about what that looks like.”
Schoenhofer hopes that ultimately, Coleman middle school represents a new model for education, showing how AI can be a vital asset to enhance learning, rather than replacing authentic hands-on learning experiences.
