How can you tell if harmful bacteria are in your food or water that might make you sick? What you eat or drink can be contaminated with bacteria, viruses, parasites and toxins—pathogens that can be harmful or even fatal. Students learn which contaminants have the greatest health risks and how they enter the food supply. While food supply contaminants can be identified from cultures grown in labs, bioengineers are creating technologies to make the detection of contaminated food quicker, easier and more effective.

Student groups compete to design a process that removes the most iron from fortified cereal. Students experiment with different materials using what they know about iron, magnets and forces to design the best process for removing iron from the cereal samples.

To reinforce students' understanding of the human digestion process, the functions of several stomach and small intestine fluids are analyzed, and the concept of simulation is introduced through a short, introductory demonstration of how these fluids work. Students learn what simulation means and how it relates to the engineering process, particularly in biomedical engineering. The teacher demo requires vinegar, baking soda, water and aspirin.

How many calories are in your favorite foods? How much exercise would you have to do to burn off these calories? What is the relationship between calories and weight? Explore these issues by choosing diet and exercise and keeping an eye on your weight.

This lesson is about the flow of energy in ecosystems. The setting is Plimoth Plantation, a living history museum in Plymouth, Massachusetts, USA, where students will learn about the first Thanksgiving meal in America, celebrated in 1621 by early American settlers and Wampanoag Indians. By examining this meal and comparing it to a modern day Thanksgiving celebration, students will be able to explore the way in which food energy moves and is transformed in an ecosystem. The learning goals focus on the movement of energy from one feeding level to the next within a food web, the way in which energy changes form, and the inefficiency of energy transfer, which in turn affects the availability of food energy for organisms at the highest feeding level. The lesson is directed at high school level biology students. Students should be familiar already with food webs, food chains, and trophic (feeding) levels. They should also be familiar with the general equations for photosynthesis (CO2 + H2O => C6H12O6) and cell respiration (C6H12O6 => CO2 + H2O), and understand the basic purpose of these processes in nature. This lesson can be completed during one long classroom period, or can be divided over two or more class meetings. The duration of the lesson will depend on prior knowledge of the students and on the amount of time allotted for student discussion. There are no supplies required for this lesson other than the downloadable worksheets (accessed on this BLOSSOMS site), paper and some glue or tape.

Students use a recipe to prepare a hydrogel gummy snack, which has a similar consistency to that found in a Haribo® gummy product. They must convert the juice and gelatin-based recipe from US customary units to metric units with dimensional analysis conversion. After unit conversion, teams are given different gelatin quantities and design their gummy snacks. Once the candies have solidified, student groups compare the gummy snacks are for viscosity and taste. After a taste test, teams reflect on their experiment and brainstorm ways to iterate a better gummy recipe.

This lesson focuses on how food packages are designed and made. Students will learn three of the main functions of a food package. They will learn what is necessary of the design and materials of a package to keep food clean, protect or aid in the physical and chemical changes that can take place in a food, and identify a food appealingly. Then, in the associated activity, the students will have the opportunity to become packaging engineers by designing and building their own food package for a particular type of food.

In this lesson, students will learn that minerals are a necessary part of our diet. They will learn that different minerals have different functions in the body. More specifically, they will discover that iron is necessary to carry oxygen around the body. In the associated activity, students will design a process that removes the most iron from the cereal.

Students learn about energy flow in food webs, including the roles of the sun, producers, consumers and decomposers in the energy cycle. They model a food web and create diagrams of food webs using their own drawings and/or images from nature or wildlife magazines. Students investigate the links between the sun, plants and animals, building their understanding of the web of nutrient dependency and energy transfer.

Students learn about energy and nutrient flow in various biosphere climates and environments. They learn about herbivores, carnivores, omnivores, food chains and food webs, seeing the interdependence between producers, consumers and decomposers. Students are introduced to the roles of the hydrologic (water), carbon, and nitrogen cycles in sustaining the worlds' ecosystems so living organisms survive. This lesson is part of a series of six lessons in which students use their growing understanding of various environments and the engineering design process, to design and create their own model biodome ecosystems.

Students learn about the unique challenges astronauts face while eating in outer space. They explore different food choices and food packaging. Students learn about the engineering design process, and then, as NASA engineering teams, they design and build original model devices to help astronauts eat in a microgravity environment --- their own creative devices for food storage and meal preparation.

Modern Pastry and Plated Dessert Techniques is one of a series of Culinary Arts books developed to support the training of students and apprentices in British Columbia’s food service and hospitality industry. Although created with the Professional Cook and Baker programs in mind, these have been designed as a modular series, and there for can be used to support a wide variety of programs that offer training in food service skills.

Student groups are challenged to create food packages for specific foods. They focus on three components in the design of their food packages; the packages must keep the food clean, protect or aid in the physical and chemical changes that can take place in the food, and present the food appealingly. They design their packaging to meet these requirements.

Earth contains a variety of plants to provide food, medicine and, most importantly, energy sources for humans. In this lesson, students will categorize plants by their components and shapes. Additionally, they will learn the mechanisms behind the making of medicines and bio-fuels. It is important that the students have prior knowledge of the plant cell structures and functions. The video duration is 21 minutes, during which the students will use skills such as classification and experimentation. The students must therefore be supplied with various samples of plants. In Arabic with English subtitles.

Last year the Siuslaw 97J School District changed our food service operation from a national supplier (Chartwell’s) to in-house food service. Our Food Service Manager instituted an organic philosophy and wanted to source local produce. Utilizing our school garden program we now help supply fresh produce for our Siuslaw Elementary School cafeteria. Crop production is stronger in the 4/5 wing because of wind protection from the building. Florence experiences high winds and we are located close to the beach so we have constant sand blowing into our crops. The K-3 garden beds do not have the same protection as the 4/5 beds, and as a result have a lower yield. Our goal is to have students design and engineer wind barriers for these beds and then present the best solutions to our school board so that we can get funding to implement our ideas. This project can be used in any school with a garden by using preexisting barriers on a the school property. The unique environment of the school would dictate the lessons required to be adapted to fit the environmental needs of the community. If the school is lacking a garden, the students can focus on an at home garden project.

Three short, hands-on, in-class demos expand students' understand of energy. First, using peanuts and heat, students see how the human body burns food to make energy. Then, students create paper snake mobiles to explore how heat energy can cause motion. Finally, students determine the effect that heat energy from the sun (or a lamp) has on temperature by placing pans of water in different locations.

How can you tell if harmful bacteria are growing in your food? Students learn to culture bacteria in order to examine ground meat and bagged salad samples, looking for common foodborne bacteria such as E. coli or salmonella. After 2-7 days of incubation, they observe and identify the resulting bacteria. Based on their first-hand experiences conducting this conventional biological culturing process, they consider its suitability in meeting society's need for ongoing detection of harmful bacteria in its food supply, leading them to see the need for bioengineering inventions for rapid response bio-detection systems.