Handouts are available for download at the end of this post.

Video Transcript

Hi Science Teachers,

Welcome to Science Teacher Summer School, Episode 8.

I’m Kent Lui, and something you may not know about me is that I’m a huge coffee geek. I’ve got a scale with a timer, a hand grinder, special beans and various types of coffee brewers at home to make the perfect cup. This one I bring to work. Now, let’s get to work.

An age old question in science education is how to get and keep students interested in it. It’s actually something that is included in our curriculum too. However, with platforms like TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram, it’s made it a bit more difficult because student’s attention are pulled away so easily by flashy things.

So, how might we do it?

To make science interesting, it’s important that we geek out on something, bring what we geek out on into class, and show students how to geek out. Geeking out really just means having a sustained – and perhaps passionate – interest in something. If you think about it, we’re actually a society that values geeks. The Olympics, for example, is just a showcase of individuals who geeked out on a singular athletic pursuit. When we’re sick, we don’t want a generalist doctor working with us – we want to seek the doctor who is the top geek in that field. And, when we read restaurant reviews on yelp or another platform, we trust the food geek who has reviewed thousands of restaurants as opposed to one that has written only a handful.

When we geek out and bring it into our classrooms, we make our lessons more engaging, more applied. And, we show students how to make scientific connections to everyday events and, also, how to take a scientific approach to everyday problems.

Like I said at the beginning of this episode, I am a coffee geek. How do I bring this into the classroom? Well, one thing I do is have students perform a pour over as part of their lab safety lesson. I show them a picture of what a coffee pour over set up may look like in the coffee. Then I ask students how to reproduce the same process here. And, they get something like this. In this lab, students learn equipment names and safety rules – like how to heat and pour water safely and filter a solution using a funnel and filter paper. It’s a simple lab, but so much is learned from brewing coffee.

I also use this vacuum siphon system – which is a super geeky way of brewing coffee – to demonstrate thermal expansion and contraction and how it can be applied to brewing a perfect cup of coffee. I relate how I alter water temperature, grind size, or amount of bean to get a great cup of coffee to the chemistry unit regarding factors affecting reaction rate. And, as for how decaffeinated coffee beans are produced – did you know it’s just a simple application of saturated solutions and filtration? When you geek out on stuff, there’s a lot of cool science that can be uncovered. And because you’re excited about it, your kids will be excited (or, at least, be impressed by your geekdom).

If parents who are doctors have kids who become doctors and parents who are teachers have kids who become teachers, then parents who geek out on stuff will have kids who geek out.

That’s all the time we have for this episode. Please leave your questions in the comments section below. Join me next time, when I’ll be talking about standards based assessment and how this can be used for even the most mundane or content driven parts of a science class – like lab safety, for example. You don’t want to miss it.

Thanks for watching. And, remember to science everywhere everyday.

Resources

Handout(s): 01 – Coffee Lab

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