EcoBoo

Hawai'i Preparatory Academy sits in the cool uplands of Waimea — one of the most respected independent schools in the Pacific, with a tradition of academic excellence and a commitment to the land that runs deep into its history. When Deighton Emmons — chemistry teacher, 23 years at HPA — called Bobby Grimes, it was because he had seen what bamboo could do and understood what it could teach.

Together they designed and built outdoor bamboo classrooms, planted school orchards, established a learning garden, a bamboo tool shed, and a bamboo pavilion. The partnership between a master builder and a master teacher produced something neither could have built alone — a living curriculum in green architecture, sustainability, and the ancient wisdom of building with what the land provides.

By the time the project was documented on film, five outdoor bamboo classrooms had been built across the island. The documentary — Hiki Nō Eco Boo — captured what happens when young hands meet a living material and a teacher who knows it from the inside out.

EcoBoo did not begin with bamboo. It began with a vision for how education itself could be transformed — and that vision belonged to Dr. Koh Ming Wei, PhD, Director of Sustainability at HPA, and one of Hawai'i's most influential voices in place-based, sustainability-driven education.

Ming Wei — researcher, educational consultant, curriculum developer, māmaki farmer, and what she calls an "intellectual farmer" — was driving HPA's Go Green initiative from the inside. She introduced Bobby to Deighton Emmons. She brought the bamboo classroom vision into the school's green curriculum framework. And she built the pedagogical foundation around what the students were physically building — creating what she calls the Pedagogy of Food and Place, connecting hands-on construction to core subjects, STEM, and foundational life skills.

Her work has since expanded far beyond HPA — USDA-funded research, NSF grants across Micronesia and Hawai'i, co-investigations into agricultural literacy, food systems education, and school learning gardens across the Pacific. She works with the Hawai'i Department of Education and travels the Pacific region sharing what she has built.

EcoBoo was a collaboration between three people — a master builder, a master teacher, and a master curriculum visionary. Without Ming Wei, there would have been no classroom to build.

The project was featured on PBS Hawai'i — broadcast statewide as Hiki Nō Episode 405 — a record of what it looks like when young people in Hawai'i learn to build with bamboo, to think in carbon, to see the natural world as a material library rather than a backdrop. The documentary has been seen by educators, architects, and bamboo builders around the world.

Educators from as far as Lahaina Luna on Maui came to study the classroom and learn the method. The ripple effect of this work continues — in every student who carried a culm, drove a screw, or sat under a bamboo roof they built themselves.

The bamboo classrooms are still standing. The students who built them have grown into professionals, educators, and leaders across Hawai'i — some of them now part of the leadership teams of the very organizations that Bobby Grimes is partnering with today.

Hiki Nō Eco Boo was never only a school project. It was a seed planted in the minds of young people at exactly the age when seeds take root and grow fastest. The carbon-sensitive, green-building, biodynamic future that Bobby has always believed in — these students are now building it.

The bamboo grows fastest in the season after it has been rooted longest.