Gardyn and Kelby win two Educators Pick Best of STEM 2026 awards
By Jessica Ritenour, Education Marketing Manager, Gardyn
Gardyn has been named a 2026 Educators Pick Best of STEM winner for Hands-on Learning for K to 12, and Kelby, our AI growing assistant, has been named an Educators Pick Best of AI winner for K to 12 Enrichment.
Two categories, one program, and every winner selected by nationally recognized STEM education innovators.
That last detail is the one our team keeps coming back to.
Educators chose these winners
Educators Pick Best of STEM puts the decision in the hands of the people who teach. Certified classroom teachers, specialists, and district leaders evaluate every entry and score it on a Net Promoter Score, the same measure that asks whether you would recommend something to a colleague down the hall.
This year’s panel was led by Annie Galvin Teich, president of The Teich Group, and included An Nguyen, Carrie Robledo, Erin Barr, Jamica Craig, Jason Aldridge, Kim Collazo, Dr. Linda Johnson-McClinton, Dr. Omah M. Williams-Duncan, and Dr. Rachelle Dené Poth. The program is run by The Teich Group and Catapult X in partnership with the National Science Teaching Association, the National Association of Biology Teachers, and MCH Strategic Data.
The program reported that hands-on learning across science, STEM, and career and technical education drew its most competitive field yet in 2026, with companies entering more categories than ever before. Winning the K12 hands-on category against that field says something clear and specific: teachers who used Gardyn with real students on real schedules would recommend it to other teachers. You can see what we presented to judges on our awards page here.
The creativity came from educators first
The best part of our team’s job is the conversations. Educators tell us what they built with a Gardyn, and most of the time it is something we would never have thought of.
Measurement and graphing units run off harvest data. Nutrition lessons anchored to food students grew and then ate. Water use comparisons between columns and a traditional bed. Persuasive writing assignments where students argue for a second unit. Full farm to cafeteria projects that pull the kitchen staff into the lesson plan. Teachers who reworked their Gardyn program into a career and technical education pathway.
That creativity belongs to educators. They looked at a tower of yCubes and found an opening in their own curriculum. Our part has been to keep up, collect what works, and pass it along, which is how pieces like nine ways to bring Gardyn into a STEM curriculum and weaving agriculture into STEM came to exist in the first place. Both are built almost entirely out of things teachers showed us.
The same goes for the outcomes we hear about that live outside the curriculum entirely. Ownership. Patience. Students who were quiet everywhere else but volunteer to check the water level. That came up often enough, and from enough different educators, that we wrote a full piece on social emotional learning and school gardens. At district scale, Howard County Public Schools has shown us what this looks like running across many buildings at once.
So an award chosen by educators closes a loop that matters to us. The people who built the creative work are the same people who decided the recognition.
Kelby, and what focused AI looks like in a classroom
Kelby stays inside the subject you are teaching. It answers questions about the plants in front of the student, the growing conditions in that specific device, and what is happening in that column this week. Ask why the basil is bolting and the answer is grounded in the plant the student is looking at.
The Best of AI program is new for 2026, created because school leaders are working to identify AI tools they can trust in a classroom. Judges evaluated every entry for safe and responsible use with students. Seven subcategories were awarded in the program’s first year, and Kelby won K12 Enrichment.
For students, that focus makes Kelby a useful first encounter with AI. The output is immediately checkable against something physical. If Kelby says the roots need attention, a student can walk over, look at the roots, and decide whether the answer holds up. Teachers have told us that verification step becomes its own lesson.
Right now is a strong moment to bring Gardyn into your program
Late August and early September is when these decisions actually get made. Teachers are back in the building, programs are being planned for the year ahead, grant cycles are opening, and schools are choosing what they want students working with between now and June. A Gardyn started in September is producing food well before the winter break, which gives you a full semester of data, harvests, and lessons to build on.
Funding tends to be the practical question, and there is more of it available than most educators expect. Our six tips for securing a grant for a classroom Gardyn covers which line items get approved, how to frame a request across more than one department budget, and where the money usually comes from.
If you are building your year out now, a few places to start: our back to school guide to adding nutrition to a student’s day, school lunch and snack recipes for connecting a tower to the cafeteria, and ideas for National Farm to School Month in October, which lands right as a September planting hits its stride.
To talk through what this looks like in your building, including which system fits your room and your headcount, start at our Gardyn for Schools page, or check out our blog on Back to School Gardyn favorites.
Thank you
An award judged by educators means something because educators did the work first. Every teacher who put a Gardyn in the classroom and let students take it somewhere unplanned, and then told us what was and was not working is part of why this happened.
We are proud of the recognition. We are excited for what your students grow with Gardyn this year.
For media inquiries or award assets, visit our press page.