Recreating the Wheel Contest

In these days of writing across the curriculum, it is important to show students that they must write about math and science in as clear and clever a way as they write about history or language arts topics. This lesson is designed to have the student be creative in the areas of home ec, science, math, creative writing, art/computer graphics, and possibly even performing arts and economics. The more subjects you can incorporate for this assignment, the better. Use fewer subjects for younger or less capable students.

In the student's math area, have them design a survey of different types of cookies that they and their friends and others in the neighborhood and family like to eat. Have five answer choices for each survey item to control responses. Items can include favorite flavors, favorite items put into the cookies (such as: raisins, chocolate chips, butterscotch chips, etc.), size of package they would buy, price they are willing to pay, etc. Let the students think up the items and responses and then go out and give the survey to as many people as possible. Once the survey has been given have the students tabulate the results in a frequency table and transform it into a graph that they think would best display the data. Younger children could take one item, like flavors, and create a pictograph to display the data.

The students will interpret the data to figure out what kind of cookie they want to make and will take the data results to their science/home ec class(es) to create a recipe of their own for the type of cookie they have chosen to make. They will experiment with different amounts of flour, sugar, flavoring, baking temperatures and times, etc. to discover what works and what doesn't. Once they hit on a recipe that they like, they will make up a batch of their cookies. They will need to use math to determine how much of each ingredient they will need to use in order to make X number of cookies...they want to make enough to allow each survey respondent to test taste at least two cookies a piece.

After the recipe is perfected and the cookies are ready for manufacture, the students then have to determine what sort of packaging material they are going to use to entice their buyers to purchase their product. Most students come up with an oak-tag or card-stock box that they hand decorate or computer decorate. Remember that the package must include the product name, ingredients list, weight of product in package, and other information usually found on cookie packaging. A trip to the grocery store to check packages that already exist should enlighten the students as to what they need to include.

In the language arts area, a jingle must be created to use in advertising the product, and the students should write a television commercial script that can be acted out and recorded if a camcorded is available for use, in which case, other children/people from the class/neighborhood can be involved in the filming.

As you can tell, this project can get quite involved, or you can keep it very simple for younger children. I have done this lesson with the cooperation of other 10th grade teachers with a low-level 10th grade class, and it has worked marvelously. We had a school-wide taste-testing session to culminate the project, in which the school was shown all of the commercials, packaging, mathematical data, etc.; given a sales pitch by the "company" representative at the tasting table, and allowed to fill out a final survey about what they found most/least appealing about each company's ideas/products/etc.