How can we smell the cookies baking at the factory from 1.4 miles away?
On the other side of Marquette Park, stands the Nabisco (now Molendez) factory that bakes famous cookies that allow for blissful odors to carry through the air. I always wondered well how come the odor is more present, certain times than others? While planning a unit around states of matter, it clicked, I could use the cookie factory as my puzzling phenomena. The kids talked about it more in the fall and spring than the winter, it was perfect.
To launch the unit, I introduced students to the phenomenon by having them compare the smell of the (warm) cookies baking at the nearby factory ~10 blocks away, to the smell of store-bought (room temperature) cookies on a plate at the front of the room. After smelling each cookie, with their eyes closed, students record their observations of both odors and discuss what they smelled; cookies! In order to unpack their prior knowledge and understandings, I asked them to model and explain how the odor (the unseen) travels from point A to point B. To my surprise, this was the most informative way I had ever began a unit. It provided me with a great platform to build on the common preconceptions students had about states of matter.
As the unit progressed, we worked on the different concepts that could help us better explain how the odor travels. Cookies, like all matter, are made up of particles. We examined how temperature affects the particle movement in each state. When the cookies are baking in the oven, they are absorbing heat causing the particles to move faster. The cookies absorb energy when they are baking in the oven and the cookie particles begin to move faster and faster. The cookie odor spreads out from the source (the oven), into the air around the factory, and then outside through any openings they can find in the building (i.e., from an area of higher cookie odor concentration to lower concentration). While the odor of hot cookies can reach our nose several blocks away, in order to smell cookies at room temperature, we have to put our nose right up to them--they don’t have enough kinetic energy to travel anywhere near the same distance. Students used the science ideas outlined to explain the Nabisco cookie odor phenomenon in their final models after periodic revisions.
To launch the unit, I introduced students to the phenomenon by having them compare the smell of the (warm) cookies baking at the nearby factory ~10 blocks away, to the smell of store-bought (room temperature) cookies on a plate at the front of the room. After smelling each cookie, with their eyes closed, students record their observations of both odors and discuss what they smelled; cookies! In order to unpack their prior knowledge and understandings, I asked them to model and explain how the odor (the unseen) travels from point A to point B. To my surprise, this was the most informative way I had ever began a unit. It provided me with a great platform to build on the common preconceptions students had about states of matter.
As the unit progressed, we worked on the different concepts that could help us better explain how the odor travels. Cookies, like all matter, are made up of particles. We examined how temperature affects the particle movement in each state. When the cookies are baking in the oven, they are absorbing heat causing the particles to move faster. The cookies absorb energy when they are baking in the oven and the cookie particles begin to move faster and faster. The cookie odor spreads out from the source (the oven), into the air around the factory, and then outside through any openings they can find in the building (i.e., from an area of higher cookie odor concentration to lower concentration). While the odor of hot cookies can reach our nose several blocks away, in order to smell cookies at room temperature, we have to put our nose right up to them--they don’t have enough kinetic energy to travel anywhere near the same distance. Students used the science ideas outlined to explain the Nabisco cookie odor phenomenon in their final models after periodic revisions.