By Bridget Valls
Walking into school from the deck on Tuesday morning, I ran into Tyler Wells, who had a pretty large decorated cake in his hands.
I never really took Tyler for a baker, so I asked him what that could possibly be for and why he would bring it to school. To my shock, he told me that the cake was for a math project.
If you’re wondering, “What does baking have to do with Calculus???” that’s exactly what I was thinking.
Anna Porter Brodnax cleared this up for me by explaining what she learned from making her own project for the class: funfetti cupcakes.
“We were learning limits and how to apply them to day-to-day life,” she said. “I feel like we never get to see how math can be helpful to us other than in school, so it was cool to see how to apply it in real life.”
Since I was still confused, Hope Maner, who made brownies, chimed in. “Basically, we baked and made equations that matched the limits we used,” she explained.
She explained that a limit was “a value that you approach but cannot get to.” They used limits to measure ingredients in their baking.
This creative way of learning was definitely a favorite among students. “It is way more fun to do this than to take a test,” Mary Everett Hicks told me. And Hope added, “It is definitely a good grade to get added to the gradebook since I think I did pretty good.”
Along with a cool learning experience, it was also a good tasting experience when they brought all of their baked goods to class.
When I walked into the class, there was an array of different desserts, from muffins to cakes to brownies to lemonade.
“It was really fun to make a project that the whole class could have,” Louise Biggs told me after giving me one of her delicious banana chocolate chip muffins.
Tess Horner actually managed to kill two birds with one stone while making her muffins. “I was able to replenish my family’s blueberry muffin supply for a grade, so I liked that,” she told me.
One part of this rubric was to explain your inspiration for choosing to bake what you did. Maiya Tomlin told me what, or rather WHO, inspired her, and that was Zarin Sapra and her obsession with the salmon bagel from Apollo Bagels.
“I found a dupe of that recipe and made that, but I could not smoke salmon, so I couldn’t bring it for the class, sorry guys,” she told me as she laughed.
This was NOT Evvie Bresnahan’s first rodeo, as she is a baker. She even has a baking account with her friend Savannah Jones.
She chose to bake cinnamon muffins, but she said it “was not my best work.” Although her muffins did not turn out as well as she had hoped, there was still a silver lining: “It helped me understand limits better,” she said.
Cortland French and Morgan Olivier found another silver lining to the project; they both told me, “Eating the food was fun, and we got to hang out.”
Given such a creative project, I was curious to ask Ms. Boozer why she chose to use it to teach limits.
“A few years ago, Ms. Scott and I decided we wanted to show students how applicable calculus was, so we decided to make a project for every unit,” she told me. She gave me a few other examples of fun projects that we will see later on, including launching marshmallows???
Talking with Ms. Boozer, I also learned that there was a video submission for this project in which students filmed themselves making the food. “I feel like I am watching the Food Network,” she told me.
With a decent number of students taking calculus right now, Ms. Boozer has seen A LOT of baked goods this week. I had to ask her what her favorite item has been so far.
To my surprise, she told me that one student made a tea. “Most students bring in cookies or brownies, so the tea was really unique,” she told me.
Although calculus is definitely not sweet to learn, this project will hopefully give students a sugar high to push them through the year.
