Young Chefs is an organization that uses hands-on cooking education to empower the next generation with culinary skills and scientific knowledge. The organization started as an afterschool program at the middle school in Northfield, MN, but has now evolved into a national organization engaging educators and students with cooking and science in diverse settings. In this presentation, we will discuss our work developing a local program into a national open-access online platform for sharing of cooking and science lesson plans and instructor materials. We will highlight how our platform has enabled us to share our resources with over 300 educators across the U.S and helped us implement and evaluate cooking and science programs in diverse educational settings and geographical locations.  We will use key examples from specific locations to discuss the versatility of online platforms for cooking and science education, highlighting that cooking and science education can be adopted as enriching academic after school programs, as supportive measures to the standard science curriculum, or just as one-time activities, with many more possibilities. Overall, these experiences have confirmed how cooking can engage students with food and science in unique ways, and how cooking encourages students to use all their senses as they cook their way into a better understanding of the natural world.<br/>

Young Chefs Program: An open-access platform for cooking and science education in the digital age

256th National Meeting (2018)

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