While scientists place high value on the scientific method, its relevance to everyday life is often opaque to nonscientists. In undergraduate teaching, its implementation is primarily apportioned to upper-level, laboratory science classes for majors. Herein we describe the modification of a recipe as a real-world project for learning the…

The authors developed a lesson for teachers to integrate chemistry and culinary arts, providing students with an opportunity to participate in three-dimensional learning, engage in science and engineering practices, and apply disciplinary core content and crosscutting concepts (Krajcik et al. 2014). The project involved five classes: three…

Several years ago, a new nonscience majors course, The Science of Food and Cooking, was developed at our institution. The course covered basic scientific concepts that would normally be discussed in a typical introductory chemistry course, in the context of food and food preparation. Recently, the course has been revamped in three major ways: (1)…

Cooking is a tangible, familiar, and delicious tool for teaching physics, which is easy to implement in a university setting. Through our courses at Harvard and UCLA, each year we are engaging hundreds of undergraduate students, primarily non-science majors, in science concepts and the scientific research process. We find that weekly lectures by…

Suggests chemistry of cooking and analysis of culinary recipes as subject matter for introducing chemistry to an audience, especially to individuals with neutral or negative attitudes toward science. Includes sample recipes and experiments and a table listing scientific topics with related cooking examples. (JN)

Discusses the construction of lenses made out of ice, including the arrangement for mounting an ice lens on a camera. Also discusses brewing coffee in an ibrik (long-handled container tapering slightly toward the top), focusing on the physics of the brewing. (JN)