Adapted from the Engineering is Elementary Curriculum

Mariana is a girl…

..who lives in the Dominican Republic Florida

She loves her garden and spends many hours there taking care of her plants. But one plant isn’t doing well – her ohelo berry plant. Her friend Pablo brought the ohelo from Hawaii for her (of course, obtaining special permission and quarantining the plant beforehand). It used to have red berries, but not anymore. Only flowers, but no berries.

She doesn’t know why so her father suggests that she ask her Tía Leti who is an agricultural engineer. Mariana visits her aunt and explains the problem. “Tía Leti, I’ve been taking extra special care of my ohelo plant, but it will not produce berries.”

Tía Leti asks her if she knows how plants make seeds. Mariana does and explains the process of pollination to her aunt. Tía Leti explains that there are seeds inside of berries which causes Mariana to wonder and ASK if her plant is being pollinated.

Mariana decides to test this hypothesis by observing her ohelo plant to see if there are any insects visiting it. Her aunt gives her a journal with which to collect her data and Mariana gets to work.

For weeks, she watches butterflies and other insects visit her plants. te.html photos/vamoose627/ /

And realizes that not a single insect is visiting her ohelo plant.

When she tells her aunt about what she observed, this leads to a discussion about why insects visit flowers and the benefits of this behavior to both the insect (food) and the plant (pollination).

Then Mariana realizes that there is nectar in her ohelo plant and asks, “Why won’t the insects come to eat it?” Her Tía Leti then responds with this analogy: imagine that you came over to my house for dinner, but I put all the food at the end of the table where you couldn’t reach it. Do you think that you would have a good dinner? Would you come to my house for dinner again?

So with that thought, Mariana starts to think up solutions for her ohelo plant and ASKS if she can bring in an insect from Hawaii to pollinate her plant. To work out her solution, Mariana decides to go visit her aunt at work. While she is there, she learns about invasive species…

…pesticides and Integrated Pest Management…

...and decides that she needs to come up with another solution to her problem—pollinating the plant herself.

Her aunt shows her a technology that she uses—a hand pollinator. Tía Leti then tells Mariana about the Engineering Design Process and how it will help her create her hand pollinator. By ASKING more questions, IMAGINING, PLANNING….

...CREATING and testing, and IMPROVING, Mariana creates a successful hand pollinator. And sure enough, her ohelo plant produces berries.

Thanks to Flickr, Fototime, and Waverly District for the images used as well as the Museum of Science for their images and the original story.