Research Center for Technology and Art, TsingHua College, NTHU (USR Project) today held a trip to the T.O.S. campus of The Affiliated Experimental Elementary School of National Tsing Hua University to experience the "T.O.S. Agricultural and Botanical Knowledge Tour". They also planted the seedlings of arabica coffee beans in Hengshan.

Su-chu Hsu, director of the Research Center for Technology and Art, NTHU said that promoting STEAM education is not just about learning in the classroom, but also about taking students outdoors or on farm trips. For example, the "pineapple" in Dafen can be found in "Fick's Law", and the gene for the immortality of ginkgoes was discovered. The Center's team has been deeply rooted in the local community to find useful and interesting questions and answers for the students so that they will be motivated to visit the mountain and stimulate their interest in learning.

The "Lao Dafen" is the earliest part of the field cultivated by the ancestors of Ming-yuan Yang, the earliest name of the place at that time. For the sake of memory and legacy, we started to cultivate the recreational farm in Dafen with the name "Dafen" in the Hakka language. In 2022, Research Center for Technology and Art, Tsinghua College, NTHU, led by Su-Chu Hsu, began helping to provide leisure cultural and creative services in Dafen by building the "Dafen Agricultural and Botanical Knowledge Trail," a database of knowledge hotspots for 90 agricultural plants on the farm, using wooden rice spoons as QR codes for cultural and creative purposes, and using augmented reality to explain hotspots and design interesting questions and answers about related knowledge.

Su-chu Hsu said that the center has been using the oldest leisure farms as demonstration bases for the past two years, allowing old farmers to learn digital technology and discover new opportunities for surprise and discovery.

Yi-shi We, principal of The Affiliated Experimental Elementary School of National Tsing Hua University, said that students from the school's T.O.S. campus were so excited to learn that they would be coming to the big one that they couldn't sleep the night before and that the whole trip was spent on scanning QRCode and filling out learning sheets, as well as planting small seedlings of Arabica coffee beans in Hengshan.

The students who participated in today's activity said that they learned a lot of plant names they had never heard of during the enrichment program, and they also collected coffee seedlings to plant at home, which was really fun.