Foothills youth have the opportunity to turn red soil and try their hand at farming on Mars.
Agriculture for Life offers a remote program called Rural and Farm Safety Escape Mail - Mission to Mars.
“We’re pretty excited,” said Ag for Life CEO Luree Williamson. “The program is designed to provide critical safety education to youth in a fun, engaging way.”
She said Mission to Mars is built around the escape room or locked room idea, with registered participants receiving a package in the mail that contains the puzzles and activities they need to complete in order to solve for clues and reveal the secret message at the end.
Each activity is safety-based and youth work through scenarios as though they are farming on Mars and tasked with building a safe environment for themselves and their co-workers, she said.
It is designed for Kindergarten through Grade 12, with more independent learning at the junior and senior high levels and facilitated instruction for younger students.
“There’s a little bit of something for everybody,” said Williamson.
She said Mission to Mars can be done at home, through school or community groups and clubs, and is designed to have students work together to brainstorm and solve problems.
So far there has been keen interest in the space-themed program.
“We’re just launching, just blasting off, and I think we’ve got about 1,000 students registered so far across Alberta,” said Williamson.
Given the interest in the program, she said it’s likely something Ag for Life will continue to offer post-COVID, particularly to help reach out to communities in more remote areas that are difficult to get to during the course of a year with limited resources and time.
Ag for Life has been offering farm and rural safety programming to youth for 11 years. Based in Calgary with roots in the Priddis area, the organization aims to raise awareness around safety and injury prevention.
“A lot of students, whether they live on the farm, they work on a farm, they play on the farm, there are many hazards in rural environments and we want to keep that top-of-mind, create that awareness, empower students to be safety ambassadors for themselves so that we can really reduce, if not eliminate, a number of preventable injuries and deaths that occur,” said Williamson.
Ordinarily, programming is delivered with a 36-foot trailer that has been converted to a safety classroom with games and manipulatives inside. It travels to schools and community events to provide workshops and courses.
Ag for Life reaches about 50,000 students and families in an average year with the trailer.
While the reach of the Mission to Mars program isn’t that high yet, Williamson said it’s a valuable offering and they hope to be able to continue to provide it at no cost.
“The very nature of the engagement and the sort of challenge for students to really critically think about safety, this is definitely a program that we’ll continue with post-COVID,” she said.
