In early 2023, we received a call from Tupelo High School’s Earth and Space Sciences teacher. She had seen HoloSands at the Cook Museum and saw the power of using it to teach Earth sciences to her 10th, 11th, and 12th grade classes.
She applied for a grant from Tupelo’s CREATE Foundation, and at their annual Association for Excellence in Education dinner she was given the largest grant they ever awarded!
Funding was generously provided by the Tennessee Valley Authority’s educational outreach because of HoloSands’ ability to teach water and environmental concepts TVA deals with every day.
Building an A/R sandbox for a school environment presented unique challenges. It had to be small enough to roll from class to class, and had to be self-contained and robust. We engineered a new design for it, cut the parts out using a CNC, and assembled it from wood, HDPE and built up acrylic.
There was a huge buzz the day we delivered the unit. We spent all day with the high schoolers explaining the environmental significance of each biome, and how the technology works under the hood (focusing on math and physics principles they were discussing that year).
In classrooms, HoloSands can be used to teach the water cycle, landforms, topography, map reading, erosion, volcanism, sea level rise, current events, math and science and so much more. We look forward to seeing how the students of Tupelo High School use HoloSands in their studies!
