To increase community interest in plants through interactive gameplay and cultural storytelling.

Corinne Takara is a STEAM educator and community art activist, and on Maui, her grandma made seed leis. She and other seed lei artists from Maui gradually realized that they had to switch to fake wiliwili seeds from the wiliwili tree because they were disappearing, and unfortunately, they became endangered. With that also came a loss of mo’olelo and story sharing. Phrases like, “When the wiliwili blooms, the sharks bite” loses its meaning when we lose our knowledge to our connection to plants in our stories.

Amy McKee is a Kanaka ʻŌiwi (Native Hawaiian) PhD student in Education, and for Native Hawaiian Plant Month, she participated in a 30-day challenge where she had to find a native plant in her neighborhood. She walked all over her neighborhood, scanning and researching plants, and it took her almost 30 days to find one native plant--ironically, when she did find the native plant, it was next door to her house, but she was unable to see it due to plant blindness.

Corinne’s and Amy’s stories address a critical issue in our community:

The need for increased awareness and knowledge about the unique plants surrounding us.

Hawai’i is a jewel of biodiversity, boasting native, invasive, and canoe plants. However, the lack of knowledge between these distinctions is alarming. With 40% of the country’s endangered species calling Hawai’i home, we face the challenge of preserving this diversity in less than 1% of the land mass.

Therefore, our mission is:

To increase community interest in plants through interactive gameplay and cultural storytelling.

Our team met at the Build4Good AI Hackathon hosted by Purple Maiʻa on December 8, 2023, and we gathered together around a shared value of wanting to increase pilina with native plants. Within 48 hours, we created and printed our first deck of plant-mon playing cards! We’ve been playing board games and learning about plants together ever since.