greenSTEMnetwork: hackathon project to teach students STEM launches

Students at four Philadelphia public schools will be using hardware to tend to their rain gardens. They’ll also learn how to build, program and maintain the hardware.

It’s all part of a hackathon project that launched late last month as part of Earth Day. A collaboration between the Water Department and civic hackers Kevin Clough and Christopher Nies, the project is called greenSTEMnetwork and aims to teach students about STEM, plus help make the city’s rivers “fishable and swimmable again,” as the City Paper put in.

greenSTEMnetwork, which used to be called Solar Sunflower, is an example of one hackathon project that beat the odds: it started as an idea from the Water Department’s Matthew Fritch at the February 2013 TechCamp Philadelphia and the team kept at it throughout the April 2013 AT&T Edutech Hackathon and countless weekly Code for Philly meetups. The project also won second place at Philly Tech Week 2013‘s edtech hackathon-focused Switch Philly demo event.

Read more about the project in the City Paper and Generocity.