Teaching Materials Science in the K12 Classroom: Food as a Building Material (Work in Progress).

Baking and cooking in K12 classrooms provide opportunities for teachers to form practical connections for students in chemistry and physics. Experiments can be conducted safely at home, school, or camp. Additionally, materials are readily available, and low cost. Culinary advances in molecular gastronomy allow us to think even further about how we can engage students in the engineering design process using food as a building material. This paper details the implementation of a science and cooking project into a K12 STEM classroom. To do so, we developed a curriculum adapted from The Science and Cooking: From Haute Cuisine to Soft Matter Science Course offered at Harvard University. Our adaptation of the program was a sixweek module in a high school classroom titled "Food as a Building Material". The curriculum used for this project was piloted for approximately 60 high school students in classes of ~20 students. Students who participated in this project were enrolled in a high school engineering elective course. In this class, food is framed as a building material and students are given the opportunity to deconstruct and rebuild edible molecules into final team-based design projects. Students were encouraged to take into consideration the engineering principles behind a meal and re-imagine the meal using different textures, delivery methods, and presentations. This paper will detail connections between the curriculum used for the "Food as a Building Material" project and the Next Generation Science Standards. We will also provide teacher reflections from our implementation to inform future implementations by other teachers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]