STEAM Designs: The Science of Cooking

This workshop engages educators in integrating STEAM principles into lessons centered on food and cooking. Using chemistry, biology, physics, engineering, math, technology, and the arts, participants learn how to design cross-curricular cooking units that are hands-on, inquiry-driven, and relevant to students’ lives. Activities explore chemical reactions in food, cultural and literary connections, nutrition, and the engineering behind cooking tools and food preservation. By framing cooking as both a science and an art, teachers gain strategies for making learning engaging, rigorous, and authentic.

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• Instruction that isolates science, math, and ELA without authentic cross-disciplinary applications.
  
  
• Limited student engagement when content feels abstract or disconnected from everyday life.
  
  
• Lack of opportunities for students to explore nutrition, food science, and cultural contexts through inquiry-based projects.

1. Connecting STEAM Concepts to Cooking: Participants will learn how to design lessons that incorporate chemistry (e.g., yeast, chemical reactions), physics (heat transfer, density), biology (nutrition, food structure), and mathematics (measurement, conversions) into meaningful food-based investigations.
   
   
2. Integrating Arts and Culture into Food Science: Educators will explore strategies such as recipe-inspired poetry, storytelling plates, cultural menu design, and literary connections (e.g., Renaissance meals or To Kill a Mockingbird foods) to deepen cross-curricular learning.
   
   
3. Designing Inquiry-Based, Hands-On Learning: Teachers will gain skills to create engineering and design projects (e.g., food storage experiments, gastronomy ratios, recipe conversions) that build problem-solving, critical thinking, and data literacy while keeping students actively engaged