Teaching high school students cellular respiration interactively.
Project developer, video producer, presenter, researcher.
September 2021 - November 2021
(3 months)
Learning science can be overwhelming in how abstract it is. In order to ground students in their understanding, I brewed kombucha as a real world application for cellular respiration and fermentation. By documenting the process through film, I also explored the connection between biology and film.
When I told people that my two biggest passions were biology and filmmaking, a common response was something along the lines of, “...how different!”
I like to think the two can exist in the same spotlight, especially when looking at the plethora of science related videos on YouTube. After all, where would I be without Hank Green’s famous series, Crash Course: Biology?
For entertainment, I watched Good Eats with Alton Brown, a cooking show that explained the chemical processes and history behind the featured recipes. Later, I discovered Bon Appétit’s It’s Alive with Brad Leone. These shows were the main source of inspiration for this project.
Kombucha is fermented tea! It uses a SCOBY (Symbiotic Culture of Bacteria & Yeast), also referred to as a kombucha ‘mother’ or ‘starter.’ The product became popular amongst health-conscious companies and individuals since it has probiotics, which promotes healthy bacteria that aid in gut health. However, the health benefits of kombucha are still largely unresearched.
I chose to brew kombucha with two different starters in order to compare how they impacted the final product’s flavor. In addition to keeping an unflavored final product, I also made a raspberry mint flavor with the two different batches, and experimented with using smoked black tea.
I created a slide deck to help students visualize the scope of my project as well as the cellular respiration/fermentation processes.
Most importantly, not many people find long lectures interesting or engaging. To combat this, I put a sample of each batch onto every student’s desk. They tasted the results as I walked them through the project and I asked them to describe the differences between each batch and if they could predict as to why these differences occurred.
I also created videos that showed the process of making each batch as students were sampling them.
A key realization I had while studying biology was that science is messy. It doesn’t like to be kept in boxes and continually evolves. While doing research on fermentation, I often found that one question lead to a million more questions and few (if any) answers.
Seeing students make the same realization while understanding the scientific processes through real world applications was a great joy, one I hope to come across again in the future.
Lastly, this project would not exist if not for Mike Handwork. I took his Introduction to Biology class during my first year of high school. It was where I first learned that science was fun. In the most endearing of full circle moments, I stood in his classroom four years later to give my kombucha lecture to his Introduction to Biology students, hoping that they thought science was fun.