The Fairchild Challenge — Fairchild Garden’s award-winning multidisciplinary STEM education competition, now in its 12th year, which reaches 130,000 students in South Florida at more than 260 schools from PreK-12 — conducted its annual Sounds of Nature Challenge 3 event on Nov. 20-21.
The event took place in Fairchild’s Garden House and approximately 125 middle and high school students from more than 30 south Florida schools participated.
South Florida is home to many environments and ecosystems, with wildlife and sounds that are unique. For Challenge 3, in partnership with the Frost School of Music at the University of Miami, middle school students identified South Florida’s environments/ecosystems and high school students chose time-lapse video that reflected tropical nature. Students then created a musical composition that brought their chosen topic to life and performed it in front of a live audience of several hundred people.
The Fairchild Challenge includes a cross-curriculum science initiative and comprehensive environmental training pipeline including the nationwide STEM directive — Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics. Extending from early childhood through advanced graduate education, its goals are aimed at recruiting future science leaders and training a new generation of professionals in environmental science.
