Students looking at their potential Tamacroppi’s. Photo Luuk Zegers In the second-year course Irrigation and Water Management, students learn how to calculate how much water a crop needs and the optimum method and frequency for irrigation. Teacher Chris Seijger thought the course material needed livening up so he came up with the Tamacroppi challenge: each student takes home one plant (onion, wheat, maize or soybean) and tries to keep it alive for as long as possible.
The plants were handed out to students on campus last Monday. The name of the challenge refers to Tamagotchi, a small egg-shaped digital device containing a virtual pet that you had to look after. This was a craze in the 1990s. ‘If the students take a plant home with them and look after it, hopefully that will help them better understand the complex concepts in this module,’ says Seijger. Unifarm, the university’s experimental crop farm, grew the crops in the greenhouses on campus.
Active learning mode
‘Over the past year, I have seen that students are very good at cutting and pasting formulas and entering data in Excel but I feel they need a better practical understanding of the relationships between the crop, water, soil and atmosphere. If they have a plant to look after at home, they will get to see, smell and feel the course content, putting them in a more active learning mode.’
