Potatoes in Mars?

Hi, everybody!
It's almost spring here in Joensuu and we are eagerly waiting to see this year's first flowers to bloom.
In the meantime we decided to do some plant-growing of our own - our newest concept includes potatoes, oat and barley. If all goes well, astronauts in Mars might be able to enjoy a
Currently we are testing which one is the best, good old regular soil or an artificial growing environment.
We haven't forgotten about the insects either. Earlier we tried to find the best way to make food out of insects but now we are trying to make food for them. The plants we chose are supposed to feed bugs along with astronauts.
What do you think, do grasshoppers prefer mashed potatoes or porrige?

20.1. T(eam)-shirts are here!

Hey everyone!

We are tributing our (so far) successful journey to science with our official T-shirts, and as January has boosted us to experiment designs, and more detailed concepts, it's nice to be identified as a team, rather than just individuals.

We are bioMARS!

Currently we're comparing different types of systems used to grow food, and figuring the best concepts from our own ideas.

We're investigating the wide web for people who've done it before us, so feel free to leave us a link to an experiment on food-growing, if you know some! :)

2016: Back to business!

Hey!
Tonight was our first official meeting of 2016, and now that we're roughly halfway through our time of the Epic Challenge Joensuu (we're scheduled to finnish in May), we will begin experimenting with our selected concepts for food growing units, and prototyping!

As we have come up with more than a hundred concepts, now each team member will try to make a testing experiment of two promising concepts, and provide the rest of the team with information on those concepts, so it will come easier to get rid of bad concepts.

Our journey has concentrated more on theory up till now, but things are about to get more exciting once the prototyping phase begins! Thanks for following us also on Facebook!

Until next time!

16.12. One hundred concepts?!

HEY, tonight we tried to categorise and choose good concepts from ~100 different ones. That's not too easy, but you know what, we're not stupid either. 

We will continue our evaluating process, and choose the best combinations from everyones ideas, which we can prototype and develop even further in 2016. 

However, tonight was the last official meeting of 2015, so it's individual work for the rest of the year. We will still post some holiday cheers in here, and in our Facebook!

Thanks, bye for now! :) 

9.12. Concepts here, concepts there

Hey!

So we've been individually coming up with greenhouse/ food growing concepts for the past week, and used yesterday to sharing our concept-ideas. Then we decided to check out a few of those more deeply, and used the Triz40-website and 39 parameters related to that. 

It all seemed quite complex at first, but once we tried it, it started to make sense, and it's a great way to develop our concepts further. Next time we'll have even more concepts to develop. 

Work in progress:

Until next time, dear readers!