I am the STEAM Engineering Coordinator at Immaculata - La Salle High School in Miami, Florida. I found Farmbot through an internet rabbit hole and brought it up to our STEAM sophomores and they were incredibly excited about working with it!
Speaking to our Dean of Innovation, Alishea Jurado, and principal this project was okayed and we would like to build farmbot as a project for our school. At first being a purely robotic and electronic project working with that cohort, but spreading it in a cross curricular manner to the rest of the school. With regards to the crops, the students want to use them for the school cafeteria. Eventually spreading them to local communities in need of food (one student has a larger Farmbot based community service project she has to flesh out with me too).
Those are our ideas, I guess my questions are:
1 - How can we go about ordering the kit for farmbot? Our school works through purchase order and I see you do not take those in the traditional method.
2 - Can we use our tax exempt forms with this or is tax not charged?
3- Is the forum a better form of contact than the contact email? I have sent several emails there and they have gone unanswered.
4- Does Farmbot, Inc have an educational partnership or curriculum set up? Would you be willing to partner with a school to develop this?
Hey @pperez42, thanks for reaching out! And my apologies for the lack of email response so far - I’ve been swamped the last few weeks with the XL campaign! Here are some answers to your questions:
You can place an order for a kit from our online shop using a credit/debit card. You can either pre-order the next generation (v1.4) device in either the standard or XL size and that will be shipped in May, or order a v1.3 device and we can ship that within two weeks in case you’re trying to get started with your project soon. In regards to the purchase order, you’re right in that we do not accept purchase orders in the traditional method of payment upon delivery. That’s because we’re currently too small of a company to offer that, and have still been largely working off of a pre-order business model so we can get the working capital up front to do manufacturing runs. About 30 to 40% of our kits are going to schools, and every school so far has figured out a way to do a direct credit/debit transaction with us. A few have resorted to using checks, which we can accept as well. But again, because of where we’re at as a company, we can’t do purchase orders in the traditional sense at this time.
Tax is only charged for customers in California. So there should be no issue with that for you.
Again, my apologies for the delayed response over email. Generally speaking, inquiries regarding orders and of course sensitive information should be over email. Inquiries that are more general, or that other community members would benefit from hearing the answer to are more suited to the forum
We don’t have any formal partnerships set up right now, though as I mentioned we have sent many schools and universities FarmBot kits, so there is a lot of potential there. We don’t yet have FarmBot curriculum either, though that is something we are hoping to develop this coming year, and will be reaching out to our educational customers when we are ready to begin a more formal collaboration.
Let me know if you have any other questions, and I’ll also follow up with you over email shortly. Thanks!
I imagined it was the new XL campaign that was tying up lines. Thank you for replying so thoroughly even through all the work that is going on!
A few hours before this post, Immaculata - La Salle High School has proudly ordered a Farmbot v1.3 and the kids can’t wait to start working on it! I’m glad the school had a way to make it work.
I have been speaking to our Dean of Innovation and she says that once that time rolls around our school would be happy to work with you on curriculum for the secondary level. Our school is accustomed to working with new technologies and we are far into making several of our programs Project Based Learning systems. Possibly even making it a capstone project for one of the upcoming school year’s.
I will personally be working with my Sophomore cohort on this the rest of the year. This will essentially be their curriculum to get it working, and then to get it off the grid. Then expanding it to our school and community!
Look forward to talking with you and with the other contributors on this forum. If you wish I can add the contact information for our Dean as a future comment so a line of communication can be opened!
Thanks a million, and I can’t wait to start working on this!
Awesome, we’ll have your bot shipped out next week, and I look forward to seeing what you and the students do with it! We’ll stay in touch as we get closer on this end to developing curriculum. Cheers!
This sounds excellent! Just to give you a pulse, we received Farmbot and the students have constructed the gantry. They are working on getting her to talk on the school’s network. This is giving them A LOT of practice troubleshooting and on the design process.
!