Aidan O’Dowd-Ryan, designed the curriculum for the UNBOXED project, The Science of Bread, as a cool opportunity to bring some hands-on science into kids’ lives while they’re out of the classroom.

“There’s a lot of biology, chemistry, and physics going on in bread baking. The process is interesting and pretty complicated. A younger kid may see that chemical reactions make the bread turn brown and taste good, but a more advanced student may want to know what chemical reactions are taking place.

But what if the bread doesn’t rise? What if the experiment fails? What is the kid learning in that process? As a science teacher, that’s the huge deal for me.

They might be disappointed that they didn’t get the product they wanted, but if they’re thinking about why that happened, then they’re doing science. What’s important is what they’re going to do now. Failure only happens when the student decides they’ve given up and they’re not going to try again.

We emphasize growth mindset in this curriculum because with baking, if you don’t practice, you don’t learn to do things really well and get the results you want. It’s not that you’re just not a good baker, it’s because you haven’t learned how to bake these things yet. The key I want students to take away – pretty much with everything, bread or science – is that if you keep practicing, you’ll be better in a year than you are today.”

– Aidan in Chicago