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A long-awaited project came to fruition on Earth Day when some Sandia Prep engineering students attended the reopening of a BioPark exhibit they helped to design.

Current and former students in teacher Anna Wilkerson’s eighth-grade Experiential Environmental Engineering for Social Impact collaborated with the City of Albuquerque to design the Nature Engagement Area at the BioPark’s Heritage Farm.

The 11-acre, year-round working Heritage Farm closed in spring 2023 to undergo a $14 million renovation. 

The Prep collaboration was hatched on an Outdoor Leadership Project (OLP) trip to Switzerland in 2023. Wilkerson was chatting with a parent who was then the lead contractor on the nature playground.

“The assignment began with a conversation about the word ‘heritage.’ They toured the site, and we thought about the space through the lens of our heritage and our connections to our past, and our present and what we thought would be important for future generations to understand,” Wilkerson explained.

The students then created presentations that they offered to the contractor, landscape architects, and BioPark staff. “The consensus was that the ideas presented were creative, fresh, and innovative,” said the city’s Project Manager Jesse Scott.

Scott then polled everyone who attended the student presentations, and they chose their favorite concept: “Connecting our Future to Our Past,” created by Henry Eaton ’28, Rowan Trafton-Holley ’28, Alex Okandan ’28, Mason Lamoureux ’28, and Dale Cooke ’28.

“The idea of providing an interactive petroglyph wall was the overwhelming favorite,” Scott said. 

Other students’ ideas that made their way into the nature playscape’s design included a cave or tunnel, made from a converted storm drain pipe, and several types of seating -- some meant to look like eroding geologic formations, and log sections that look like they were chewed by beavers, Scott said.

“At every portion of the project, you can find our students’ ideas. Pretty awesome!” Wilkerson said. 

The Heritage Farm reopened on April 22. It includes expanded crop gardens, an orchard, vineyard, and more. Among the animals housed at the farm are an American paint horse, Nigerian dwarf goats, Navajo-Churro sheep, and chickens.