MenTern Update 2025

The MenTerns for 2025 are a fun, eclectic, and unstoppable force. This year’s cohort includes Artists, Engineers, Biologists, Veterinarians, Geneticists, and Industrial Warriors—each bringing their unique spark to the table.

More than ever, they’re stepping boldly into their own space, finding their voices, and shaping their paths with confidence and creativity. I couldn’t be prouder of how far they’ve come and where they’re headed.

MenTern is a portmanteau of MENtor + inTERN. Just as Mezzacello is a portmanteau of Monticello, they possess special skills and interests that will help Mezzacello teach complex STEM ideas.
— Jim Bruner, Futurist Farmer and Alpha Animal at Mezzacello Urban Farm

Here’s to the power of mentorship, momentum, and the magic of the MenTerns. Let’s keep building.

What Is a MenTern?

All MenTerns are kids, but not all kids are Menterns. A MenTern is a bright individual who has attended a Mezzacello Urban Farm program before and has displayed natural insight, competence, and leadership skills. MenTern is a portmanteau of MENtor + inTERN. Just as Mezzacello is a portmanteau of Monticello, they possess special skills and interests that will help Mezzacello teach complex STEM ideas.

MenTerns co-design and co-teach camp content and design challenges to help kids learn better, faster, more dynamically through near peer and peer to peer mentorship. Each MenTern has a focused skill set, but can cross-teach using the Design Challenge layout and packaging. Some MenTerns teach through art, some through gamification, and others through straightforward building ideas.

Innovation Through Play

One of my favorite Design Challenges to come out of this year’s MenTerns was Lula’s brilliant “Reframe Size” art challenge.

In this creative exploration, Lula invites participants to visualize scale through a nested world—beginning with Matryoshka dolls encased in an ecology dome, then journeying inward through layers of existence: from organisms to cells, to molecules, atoms, and all the way down to the quantum level, where we encounter energy—the most fundamental force of nature.

The challenge begins with a playful yet powerful prompt:
"What does the world look like when you're very small?"
Children are invited to choose a tiny perspective—an ant, a bacterium, a single cell, or even a baby human—and use art supplies to draw or model how their chosen life form might experience the world.

As they create, they are integrating concepts they've just learned—traversing ecosystems, cell biology, math, chemistry, and physics—all through the lens of imagination and empathy. The result is not only wildly creative but also deeply educational, beautifully merging STEM and the arts. See STEAM.

Lula’s “Reframe Size” is a testament to how design thinking and artistic curiosity can unlock profound scientific understanding—and how MenTerns are leading the way in reimagining education from the inside out.

Jim Bruner

Jim Bruner is a designer, developer, project manager, and futurist Farmer and alpha animal at Mezzacello Urban Farm in downtown Columbus, OH.

https://www.mezzacello.org
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