Home Depot Expands Digital At-Home Learning Options

Need to Know

• A new video learning series, Virtual Field Trips, will be added to Home Depot’s existing suite of DIY video content.
• The series, aimed at school-aged children, will provide behind-the-scenes tours showing how products are designed and built.
• The first episodes, which provide a tour of the greenhouses at Niagara-based Bonnie Plants, are now live.

Analysis

Home improvement chain Home Depot is diversifying its online video offerings, launching a new video learning series of kid-friendly at-home learning options.

Virtual Field Trips, which is now live, provides behind-the-scenes looks at how some of Home Depot’s product offerings come to life. The series’ first episodes take viewers on a tour of Bonnie Plants, a Niagara-on-the-Lake greenhouse that provides Home Depot with vegetable plants and seeds. The episodes are hosted by representatives from Bonnie Plants, who narrate plant-growing processes and practices using kid-friendly language and learning prompts, and are linked to related shoppable projects that parents can do with their kids at home, such as DIY plant markers.

“Learning looks significantly different this year as parents search for new ways to teach and entertain at home,” Lisa DeStefano, vice president of brand marketing and creative for The Home Depot, said in a statement. “Our Virtual Field Trips provide fun, exclusive tours, curated specifically for young doers. From plant genetics to supply chain, we’ve broken down these stages into creative, interactive, digestible videos with accompanying DIY projects that bring the excitement of traditional field trips to family households.”

Virtual Field Trips is not the first effort on the part of Home Depot to engage a younger audience online. Home Depot partnered with Discovery Education in 2017 to launch its Science Fair Central platform, which offers classroom activity and at-home workshop ideas for teachers and parents. Science Fair Central workshops focus on STEM and projects and are geared at children aged K-12 (though there is a larger proportion of workshops aimed at older children and teens).

The Home Depot effort is also not the first from a large company aiming to engage younger audiences in a digital capacity during the pandemic. Earlier this month, Walmart announced the launch of its interactive Halloween Camp Program, which offers contact-free and socially distant ways for parents and their children to celebrate Halloween. The program features six interactive video episodes, including guided craft tutorials and the Great Family Showdown, an interactive game show hosted by actor Neil Patrick Harris. Halloween Camp is available on Walmart’s website and via its mobile app.

Home Depot will launch its second Virtual Field Trips series, featuring hydroponics company Back to the Roots, in November.