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MANSFIELD -- Perhaps not all of the third grade students at the Jordan Jackson School can properly pronounce "hydroponics," but just ask Shauna Kelly, 9, what she's learned lately in science teacher Robert Cote's class.

"I learned that plants don't need soil to grow, they just need nutrients, light, air and good care," Kelly explained as she and her classmates crafted a wick hydroponic system using soda bottles and rope.

And "it's really cool," said fellow 9-year-old Kevin Bouck, a refrain similarly voiced by other children about the project.

Hydroponics is a technology for growing plants involving nutrient solutions (water containing fertilizer) with or without the use of an artificial medium, like sand, perlite or peatmoss.

Hydroponics is not new. The first use of controlled-environment agriculture dates to the first century when it was used to grow off-season cucumbers for the Roman Emperor Tiberius, according to Merle Jensen of the Department of Plant Sciences at the University of Arizona. But the technology has been refined over the years. And Cote refined it a bit more for his third graders.

"I always had an interest in hydroponics," said Cote, who outside of school is a hobby farmer, growing an organic garden and raising goats and bees. "But I thought it would be too complicated for third graders."

He took another look, however, after seeing 8-foot-tall, inch-thick stalk tomatoes grown hydroponically at Gateway Farm in Weston last summer. At the time, he was on an eight-farm tour as part of a Massachusetts Agriculture in the Classroom program.

Thoroughly impressed, Cote modified the system used to grow the giant tomatoes and implemented it in his classroom.

"You can use hydroponics at any level," he said. "This is a passive system, usually there are pumps."

The class project teaches observation skills and lessons on the water cycle.

"You put the wicks in the nutrient (solution) so that it can sort of go up," to feed the plant, Kerrin McCarthy, 9, explained. "We already tried it with beans and they're starting to grow."

"You can put in pieces of shirt" and other materials to substitute for a wick, 9-year-old Hannah Reiter added.

"It's kind of cool seeing the plants grow in a different way," McCarthy said, noting containers can vary too, from Slinkies to Legos.

The containers and plants have varied over the past several months, Cote said. During this particular class, the children were planting golden pathos cuttings. Cote, who was in information technology at a Fortune 500 company for 30 years before taking up teaching, was asked to present his class hydroponics project at the 7th annual Growing Minds Through Massachusetts Agriculture conference earlier this month.

"They love science," Cote said of his students. "Most third graders do."

As for the new hydroponically planted golden pathos, third-grader Caitlin Whitman thinks this science project will be a success.

"I think it's going to grow pretty good," she said.