Wild edible, medicinal and poisonous plants are an ideal way to connect students to the natural world just outside their door. In this unit, students will be able to identify edible, medicinal and poisonous plants using guide books and plotting them on the Siftr app. Using the collected edibles, students will then follow a procedural text to create food from their wild edibles. Students will then create recipes on their own based on a wild edible of their choice to create community cookbooks.

As a class, students work through an example showing how DNA provides the "recipe" for making our body proteins. They see how the pattern of nucleotide bases (adenine, thymine, guanine, cytosine) forms the double helix ladder shape of DNA, and serves as the code for the steps required to make genes. They also learn some ways that engineers and scientists are applying their understanding of DNA in our world.

" This seminar is designed to be an experimental and hands-on approach to applied chemistry (as seen in cooking). Cooking may be the oldest and most widespread application of chemistry and recipes may be the oldest practical result of chemical research. We shall do some cooking experiments to illustrate some chemical principles, including extraction, denaturation, and phase changes."

Students practice the ability to produce clear, complete, accurate and detailed design drawings through an engineering design challenge. Using only the specified materials, teams are challenged to draw a design for a wind-powered car. Then, they trade engineering drawings with another group and attempt to construct the model cars in order to determine how successfully the original design intentions were communicated through sketches, dimensions and instructions.