greenSTEMnetwork, a soil-monitoring kit designed to teach students about STEM, started like many other hackathon projects do. Someone had an idea, pitched it at a hackathon and found a team of developers to work on it.

But instead of fizzling out and losing steam after the hackathon ended, like most projects do, the team continued to work on greenSTEM for a year and a half, up until it was ready to ship. Matthew Fritch, the Water Department environmental engineer who originally presented the idea at the February 2013 TechCamp hackathon, which, full disclosure, Technical.ly Philly organized with the U.S. State Department and dev firm Jarvus, plans to install the kits at four public schools next week.

So what made greenSTEM different?