Home » Case Studies » Sprouts

Sprouts

CGMA tweet

An intiative that gives inner city school children the opportunity to learn first hand about the food they eat, the way it is grown and how it arrives on their plates.

It inspires children to eat healthily and also to connect with their local markets and community. Sprouts, created by New Covent Garden Market and Wandsworth Borough Council, currently works with eight local primary schools, a special needs school and a secondary school. During the visits to the Market and farm, the children learn about the food supply chain and how food arrives on their plates at school and restaurants around the city, as well as understanding the important benefits of eating your 5-a-day. Throughout the year, each school grows an edible, sustainable garden in their school grounds in the attempt to win one of the top growing prizes at our Annual Celebration event. Working alongside the RHS Campaign for School Gardening, the growing competition not only gives the children the opportunity to learn first hand about food and how it is grown, but also to discover all the other educational and personal benefits of gardening.

Special thanks to: Alastair Owen

Weblink: www.sproutsproject.org.uk

Key features include:

User profiles

Schools are able to keep track of their own content and site updates through customised profiles which include blog posts, about text, sprouts points, school galleries and badges (award scheme to encourage school users).

The profile is a place where the schools can manage their Sprouts projects and see contributed content to the site, such as blogs and photos.

 

Resources

/The resources section of the site provides useful ideas and advice for both learning about food and where it comes from as well as growing tips and suggestions.

It includes downloadable PDF’s which includes work sheet and manuals for the schools, as well as video tutorials and external links to useful information. Categories covered include growing advice, healthy eating, markets and farms and sprouts info.

Blogs

Schools and admin users can add blogs on the Sprouts site, they can post details on their latest achievements within the Sprouts project and upload images, comment on content and ‘like them’.

Gallery

Each school has their own individual gallery for photos of the pupils implementing Sprout projects. Many images can be uploaded by the school; they will then appear in the gallery with a description, comments and a like button.
No wall posts available.

I came to BrightLemon in December 2010 asking them to create a network for the schools involved in our project giving them the ability to share blogs and photos with each other in a fun and easy-to-use website. BrightLemon more than achieved this and built us a fantastic site with exceptional design and branding and their idea to introduce a point scoring system to encourage the schools to participate was brilliant. The feedback from all the schools has been very positive and all of them are using it regularly and interacting with each other in a way that wasn’t possible before. This is the fourth year of our Sprouts project and thanks to the website this is the best year so far! Also, they did incredibly well to turn this site around in what was a very short time frame.

Alastair Owen, New Covent Garden Market

>> Back to Case Studies