Science and Cooking is a general education course at Harvard that uses food and cooking as a way to teach basic chemistry and physics at the college level. Each week of the course, a guest chef shares culinary creations from his or her kitchen, followed by explanations by the instructors of the underlying chemistry and physics. Students also do a lab using recipes in everyday cooking and haute cuisine in order to explore the scientific concepts on a deeper level. The course was converted to an online course in 2013 and has since been offered on the Edx platform in two iterations. Each version has drawn between 70,000-100,000 registrants. The new data from this large number of student interactions with the course platform offers a unique opportunity to catch a glimpse of how students interact with a course of this kind where scientific concepts are explained in unconventional ways to students of broad backgrounds. This talk will explore student interaction with the material, ranging from video watching to homework and lab assignments.

Teaching science in unconventional ways: Analysis of student learning in Science & Cooking

251st National Meeting (2016)

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