This final project was focused around bread. We baked a bunch of bread. In humanities, we studied how bread is made and viewed in different cultures, in math we made graphs showing the changes in nutrition in each stage of the bread making process and constructed designs to put on cutting boards, and in physics we made machines that could help with a part of bread making.
Bread Making
The main part of this project was baking bread. We started off baking bread in small bread machines (which never really turned out that good), then moved on to different recipes in actual ovens such as focaccia, pizza, etc. Then, we were put in groups based on what type of bread we wanted to make and made our own recipe from scratch (my group wanted to make sourdough bread). For the next few weeks, we baked bread according to our recipe and revised it as needed. By the end, our group made sourdough chocolate bread that actually tasted okay!!
Humanities
In Humanities, we started off making pages that showed the evolution of a man made product over time. Then, we made pages showing how humans affected something in nature. Finally, we were asked to make a detailed page on how something that helps the bread making process has changed over time. The purpose of all of these was to warm us up to the project and to get us thinking about how humans have affected so many things, including bread making. After making all of these pages, we were then moved to something different. Almost every day in class, we were given a writing prompt that had something to do with food, and a few people would be called up to tell their short story. This was getting us ready for telling our final story, though we weren't aware of it. We were also asked tointerview someone to hear how they told their stories. After we practiced listening to and telling small stories, we had to come think of one final story based on a theme our group chose. My group decided on the theme "Adventure", and from that I decided on a story to tell, which was of the time my dad got us lost in the Famosa Slough. For a few weeks we told and revised our story many times, and were trained to tell the story with confidence and without any awkward things we did instinctively.
Math
For math, we learned about functions, specifically piecewise functions. To tie it into our bread making project, we made graphs that showed the change in the amount of some sort of vitamin over each step of the bread making project. Another math related thing we learned about in this project was Baker's Percentage. In Baker's Percentage, flour is always 100% and the other ingredients are within a certain range (Water is always around 50 - 60%, salt is 0.5 - 2% etc.). We used this a lot, especially on our final recipe cards. It's what legit bakers do and it was surprisingly easy to learn.
Physics
To warm us up to building machines, our physics teacher had us take apart bread machines and build new things from them. My group wanted to build an incubator, but unfortunately, we didn't get it working in time although we had all of the parts and were really close. Then, we had to come up with machine ideas that related to bread making. I ended up in a group that was building a cocoa grinder. There were a lot of different parts to this project and I'm really glad that this was a group project because we didn't even end up getting everything completely done even in a group that, by the end, had 2x the people than other groups (long story, but basically our group's bike was stolen so we had to team up with another group to build our bike). I mainly worked on the design process and the User Manual. I would explain more about our machine right here, but it's all in the User Manual so if you would like to know specifics about our machine, you can read that there.