Tennessee
New Yorkers trade city life for chores on Thompson’s Station farm
When New Orleans-native Sami Khan co-founded a mobile game seven years ago, he could’ve never imagined it would land him and three New Yorkers on a farm in Thompson’s Station.
Atlas: Earth is a mobile metaverse game that allows players to buy virtual real estate, which mimics the real world, to earn and cash out rewards.
“ We started thinking about building entertaining content that can help mobilize our community and include them in more ways to earn/win money,” Khan said. “So our next task was how can we get our community to earn even more money and tie it into something entertaining that the rest of the community will wanna watch?”
The result, a YouTube game show called “Cashtronaut.” With the success of “Squid Game” and creators like Mr. Beast, game shows where you complete a variety of tasks for money are all the rage on social media.
When they originally began to plan for this “fish out of water” concept of having people from large cities live in rural or semi-rural areas, they chose to have people from Los Angeles, New York and Miami.
Khan and his group landed on only New Yorkers solely by chance.
“ The original idea was to find somebody in Miami and Los Angeles and New York but around that time we actually got the opportunity to have an ad in Times Square,” he said. “It was at that moment that we were like, wait a second. If we’re gonna have an ad in Times Square, why don’t we use three New Yorkers?”
From then, they completely shifted their original plan, and several months later they ended up on the Whispering Willows Farm in Thompson’s Station.
“ We were very excited and thought it would be a lot of fun,” said Jen Wilson, the co-owner of Whispering Willows Farm and Dairy. “ This is not the first time that we’ve done videotaping but we just really enjoy it.”
Besides a background in agriculture, Wilson also is a research scientist with degrees in biology and physics. She and her husband are also foster parents, and the space of the farm allows their children to gain new skills while relying on the animals as a sort of therapy.
“We’ve been foster parents for over 20 years, and as we grew older, we realized that having animals was really helpful for the foster kids,” she said. “So we ended up with a garage full of rabbits and then decided we needed to move. We got a farm and then just kind of grew from there.”
Upon arrival, the contestants were dropped straight into Thompson’s Station and forced to adapt quickly as they took on a series of hands-on challenges far removed from their city comfort zones.
The three Manhattan-based contestants from different walks of life included a DoorDash driver, fashion designer and lifestyle content creator.
They took part in challenges such as milking a cow in below-freezing temperatures, searching a potato field to locate potatoes marked with each contestant’s initials, and navigating a tractor through a timed obstacle course.
The episode also culminated in a high-energy farm race featuring an egg relay, crawling through mud, lassoing, and leading a sheep up a hill to the finish line. After a tightly contested final push, Courtney Moore, the content creator, emerged victorious, taking home the $10,000 grand prize.
“I had absolutely no idea what I was getting myself into, and that’s what made it so fun,” she said. “Going from Manhattan life straight into farm challenges was wild, exhausting, and honestly empowering. Winning the $10,000 was incredible, but the experience itself was unforgettable.”
In addition to awarding the cash prize, Cashtranaut donated $5,000 directly to the Thompson’s Station farm as a thank you for hosting and supporting the production.
“ Our dream is to build a learning barn where kids and adults could come learn about agriculture as well as some other things,” Wilson added. “I’ve homeschooled my biological children but it’s hard to teach biology without a lab. We would love to create a space where we could host homeschool lab classes for other students where we could do dissections and learn various skills.”
As with any challenge, Khan explained although earning money is a big part of it, they aim to educate the players and viewers.
“ If you watch the New Orleans episode where, you know, teaching people about the Napoleon House and a little bit about the history of the French Quarter,” he said. “These houses in the French Quarter were also slave quarters, and we’re trying to educate in a way where it’s not like preachy or aggressive. We’re just showing people what happened here.”
Their next challenge will take place at a public school in Seattle.
“ We’re making a video where we allow the school to earn up to $20,000 of fundraising,” he said. “We’re realizing that we can actually use these videos to educate a bit more about things like the lack of public school funding. So it’s a full loop because although we are creating content and making money, we are also giving it back.”
You can follow and learn more about Cashtronaut’s challenges on their YouTube page, www.youtube.com/channel/UCdXRY4jVYEmXaPfWskicV8A. Additional information about Whispering Willows Farm can be found at wwfarmanddairy.com/.
Tennessee
Former Tennessee teacher who allegedly showed nude photo to student indicted by grand jury
MONTGOMERY COUNTY, Tenn. (WZTV) — A grand jury has indicted a former Montgomery County high school teacher for allegedly showing an inappropriate photo to a student.
In March, FOX 17 News reported that 52-year-old Matthew Vedder, a teacher at Montgomery Central High School at the time, showed a 17-year-old student a nude photo of himself. Vedder told investigators he accidentally swiped to the photo while showing students photos of a school project. He later resigned from Montgomery Central High School.
Makenzie Ellithorpe, is the Montgomery Central High School student who Matthew Vedder allegedly showed inappropriate photos to. (Photo: FOX 17 News)
MORE | Teacher accused of showing nude photos to student resigns, family pushes for charges
On July 7, the Sumner County District Attorney’s Office presented the results of a law enforcement investigation into Vedder to the Montgomery County Grand Jury, which voted to indict him on four counts of exhibiting obscene material to a minor.
Vedder was taken into custody by the Montgomery County Sheriff’s Office. A Montgomery County judge set his bond at $10,000.
RELATED COVERAGE | Family renews calls for CMCSS director’s resignation during heated school board meeting
Although Vedder resigned, the family of a Montgomery Central High School student called for the resignation of the Director of Schools, Dr. Jean Luna-Vedder, Matthew Vedder’s spouse. The district previously told FOX 17 News that Luna-Vedder removed herself from any disciplinary decisions and the investigation involving her husband.
As of June, Luna-Vedder has not publicly commented on calls for her resignation.
This is an ongoing story. Stick with FOX 17 News as we bring you the latest.
NASHVILLE, Tenn. (WSMV) – Isolated showers and storms over the next few days will make for more brilliant color displays across the sky.
Rainbows have been very common across Middle Tennessee for several evenings now. With all the recent rain, conditions have been ideal for fabulous displays of brilliant colors. Some of you have even reported seeing double rainbows. WSMV4 viewer, Leslie Whited, captured the one above, early Tuesday evening, July 14th.
To find out how double rainbows form, let’s first examine how a single rainbow occurs.
Single rainbows form when the sun, positioned behind you, has its light refracted through raindrops ahead of you.
Those raindrops bend sunlight as it passes into the drops. Then, some of that light reflects off the back of the drop and is bent one more time as it exits the drop. That entire process is called single reflection. Single reflection produces the primary or brightest rainbow.
Sometimes, some light reflects twice while in a raindrop before exiting. This is called double reflection. Double reflection produces a secondary rainbow. The order of colors within a secondary rainbow is a mirror image of the primary rainbow (i.e. the reverse). Secondary rainbows are not as bright as primary rainbows because less light is double reflected than is single reflected (i.e. some light is lost or attenuated every time light is reflected). Notice the fainter secondary rainbow in Leslie Whited’s double rainbow/storm picture at the top of this article.
The ideal time to see a rainbow is when the sun is relatively low in the sky (and has the best chance of being at your back). That translates to early morning or evening. Since in our current weather pattern, showers and storms are most numerous during the late afternoon and evening, that’s when you’ll have the best chance of seeing a rainbow through the rest of this week. If you’re very lucky, you might even see a double rainbow.
Happy sky watching!
For life-saving weather alerts, customized messages on conditions and forecasts, and videos detailing upcoming weather events, download the WSMV 4 First Alert Weather app for iPhone or Android. Have weather pictures or videos? Share them here.
NASHVILLE, Tenn. (WSMV) – A Tennessee school district is crediting an AI teaching assistant program with helping students improve their TCAP English Language Arts (ELA) scores.
Scott Langford, the director of schools for Sumner County, said in a press release that a preliminary report shows that education tech company CourseMojo has been helping maintain student engagement “at the most rigorous point of the lesson.”
“Students take ownership of their own learning while teachers can measure individual student progress in real-time,” Langford said. “Teachers benefit from the feedback to connect students to the standards included in each activity.”
Sumner County schools conducted a pilot test of CourseMojo for sixth graders in six schools during the 2024-2025 school year. After finding an average 8 percentage point increase on the TCAP ELA assessment for those students, they decided to expand the program’s use to all middle school grades last academic year.
While usage of Coursemojo varied across schools, a preliminary analysis of the district’s 2026 TCAP ELA assessment data showed that groups with an average of 25 or more Coursemojo activities per student improved ELA proficiency by an average of 3.7 percentage points. Groups with little or no use of the program saw -0.2 percentage points during those assessments, the district said.
Eighth-graders had the “strongest gains,” the district said, after “stagnant performance for the last several years.” According to the district, those students who had an average of 25 or more Coursemojo activities had an average increase of 8.7 percentage points in proficiency.
Dacia Toll, co-founder and co-CEO of Coursemjojo, said that the “technology alone doesn’t improve student outcomes,” but that the success depends on how educators implement tools.
“Sumner County Schools has been incredibly thoughtful about integrating Coursemojo while keeping rigorous curriculum and great teaching at the center,” Toll said. “We’re proud to partner with a district that’s so committed to their own learning and to helping every student succeed.”
While the district boasts improved proficiency with the AI tool, it also said that its preliminary findings compare outcomes among school-grade groups with different levels of implementation, “rather than against schools that did not use the platform.”
More analyses are expected to be done with the final TCAP data.
Even with the help of the AI tool, the district was not the top in the state for proficiency increase in its TCAP ELA scores, according to state data.
However, district TCAP results show that from 2024 to 2026, the percentage of middle school students not meeting expectations decreased from 54.7% to 51.9%. The number of students meeting or exceeding expectations increased from 45.3% in 2024 to 48.1% in 2026 for ELA.
While that is an improvement, it remains unclear the exact influence Coursemojo had on those scores. And overall, the results show that less than half of Sumner County middle schoolers are proficient in ELA — a result that echoes statewide.
Copyright 2026 WSMV. All rights reserved.
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