Light-shines-into-the-campus-

Some time ago, the Wuxi Institute of Educational Sciences announced the list of high-quality courses in science education, engineering education and artificial intelligence education for primary and secondary schools in Wuxi in 2025. Wuxi Meili Middle School's "Optical Core Farm: Plant Factory System Engineering Practice" was successfully selected and the municipal project was successfully approved!

Wuxi Meili Middle School stated that "Optical Core Farm: Plant Factory System Engineering Practice" features "light" as the core driver and "chip-level" precise control, cultivating students' systematic cognitive framework in the fields of science and engineering, and becoming innovative practitioners with basic engineering literacy and scientific inquiry capabilities.

The project focuses on engineering practice, integrates multi-disciplinary knowledge such as physics, chemistry, biology and information technology, and strengthens students' interdisciplinary application abilities and systematic thinking. It is a demonstration of the achievements of the school's engineering education construction.

This is a concentrated expression of the educational value of the plant factory. As an efficient system that intelligently controls environmental conditions such as temperature, humidity, light, CO₂ concentration, and nutrient solution, the plant factory itself is an excellent practical platform for the integration of multidisciplinary knowledge.

This just hits the pain point of traditional subject-specific education, and it provides a real, complex and fascinating "interdisciplinary center". When knowledge no longer lies in isolation in textbooks, but is used to jointly protect the optimal growth of a plant, systematic thinking and engineering literacy to solve real problems quietly take root in this "Optical Core Farm".

Here, students need to think: Why do different light qualities affect plant morphology? How to accurately prepare the ingredients of nutrient solution? How can sensor data be linked to control the environment? When children adjust the LED spectrum in the "Light Core Farm" and set the light cycle in front of the intelligent control terminal, they are not only learning knowledge, but also experiencing the construction of future agriculture.

Educational significance: more than just planting

The educational significance of plant factories on campus goes far beyond traditional planting activities:

1. Interdisciplinary learning platform: Students need to comprehensively use multi-disciplinary knowledge such as physics, chemistry, biology, information technology, etc. to truly realize the integration and application of knowledge.

2. Cultivation of engineering thinking: From system design, parameter control to problem solving, students personally experience the complete engineering practice process. For example, students from the Fengtai Experimental School affiliated to the Beijing Institute of Education assembled and built a small plant factory frame with their own hands, and "moved" the scientific and technological planting in the laboratory to the park.

3. Scientific inquiry ability: Through continuous observation, comparison, analysis, tracking, recording, and research, students can independently ask questions, discover problems, and solve problems. In the "Exploring the Plant Factory" course at Xianlin School Affiliated to Nanjing Normal University, students are divided into groups to plant cucumbers, tomatoes and other vegetables, performing high-tech operations throughout the process, recording experimental data, analyzing and solving problems.

4. Cognition of future agriculture: Let students intuitively experience the leap from "experience planting" to "smart agriculture" and understand how modern agriculture "directs" plant growth through data systems

Among them, LED artificial light source technology is an important technology for plant factories. When the plant factory comes to campus, it not only allows students to understand the relationship between light and plants, but also allows them to personally participate in spectrum control experiments. For example, in some school courses, students make their own LED plant growth lights and conduct chlorophyll extraction experiments to deepen their understanding of plant photosynthesis and chlorophyll absorption spectrum in practice.

Industry opportunities for agricultural lighting

In addition to Wuxi Meili Middle School, some schools across the country are exploring the educational application of plant factories. For example, Yunxing Primary School in Xuzhou City, Jiangsu Province implements the "Internet of Things + Plant Factory" project, and students use sensors to obtain plant growth information in real time. Information and intelligent control; Shanghai Jiao Tong University upgraded the "balcony vegetable garden" into a modular plant factory to build a new model of team collaboration for creative labor education... The plant factory entering the campus is not only an innovation in education methods, but also a vivid practice of the deep integration of agricultural lighting technology and education.

The entry of plant factories into campuses has brought new development opportunities to the agricultural lighting industry. Campus plant factories need lighting solutions suitable for teaching scenarios, which opens up new application areas for LED plant growth light companies, and may also become a testing ground and application display window for new technologies and products. At the same time, the popularization of plant factories on campus will surely cultivate a group of new-age talents who understand both agriculture and technology, injecting continuous innovative vitality into the development of smart agriculture.