Cultivating a Garden—and a Community
They knew there was a problem a group of middle school students couldn’t identify an eggplant. This lack of understanding is indicative of a larger problem in Bethlehem’s South Side, an urban area that doesn’t have adequate access to fresh, healthy foods.
So a group of College of Business and Economics students worked alongside design arts and engineering majors to tackle a real-world problem in their own backyard.
The students, part of the integrated product development program, spent the spring semester knee-deep in well water, potting soil and feasibility studies.
They split into five teams: two greenhouse teams addressed the possibility of installing compact greenhouses on Lehigh’s Goodman Campus; two power teams searched for a local power source to provide heat and electricity to the greenhouses; and an irrigation team explored ways to collect and distribute water within the greenhouses.
Through trial and error, feasibility studies, design mock-ups and cost analyses, each team came up with a solution to the problem—and a way to provide the South Side with a brighter future.
Kyle Keyes ’11, who just graduated with a supply chain management degree, stressed the importance of hands-on, experiential projects like this.
“It’s very beneficial to work on a real project from inception to implementation,” Keyes says. “When you are involved throughout the whole process, you get a first-hand look at all of the challenges that are involved in developing a product, as well as ways to work through these problems.”
Keyes said that it was also rewarding to work with students from all three of Lehigh’s undergraduate colleges.
“It is this sort of cross-functional team that we will be working with in our future careers, so the experience is critical,” Keyes says. “Being able to communicate with students from other educational backgrounds is such a useful skill.”