Tag

Kitchen Lab

Browsing

Kitchen Lab awarded Women in Research grant

Great news! The Kitchen Lab team have been awarded a Women in Research grant to further develop work that was piloted in 2020.

The project is titled “From the lab bench to the kitchen bench: expanding the accessibility to science skills training in uncertain times” and aims to determine how to better teach science students in remote learning situations. All students, including regional and remote, off shore and students with vulnerable health conditions will be able to access hands on laboratory learning in their home environment.

Our team is busily ‘hacking the pracs’ in preparation for deploying kits in semester 1, 2022.  Watch this space!

Exploding Marshmallows! (and experimental design)

Hello all 🤗!

It’s been a few weeks, but we wanted to show you all the cool pictures and ideas that the MTeach (primary) students came up with for our exploding marshmallows workshop [come check it out for yourself here!].

The premise of this workshop is the investigation on how to change the environment of a few different marshmallows – the Giant North American species, the Dwarf Australian species (with pink and white subtypes) and the elusive Sugar Exoskeleton Peep! There are many things you can do with a marshmallow – heat them up, submerge them, squish and stretch them; but how do you measure those things and what do you actually have the time to do in a workshop? Remember to think critically – too many variables, and you won’t be able to get it all done or properly investigate it all. Too obscure of a variable to measure might leave you with no results! Our workshops are intentionally left open ended so as encourage further exploration and investigation by our students.

So, for some inspiration, and also to honour our MTeach students from Week 2, here’s what they got up to in the workshop!

[Top left]: Measuring degree of splat (or expansion) of a marshmallow after a certain time in the microwave.

[Top right]: Measuring which marshmallow is most suited to hot chocolates, using the average temp of hot chocolate of 86°C!

[Bottom]: How compressed can a Peep be? (using weights and a paper plate stabiliser)

All of our students did so well with the experiment, and we saw many innovative and new ways of exploring this workshop!

Thank you to all that could come, and we hope to run some more soon!

The Kitchen Lab Team