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Cooking, the trick for your children to review math this summer

2021-08-13T03:16:44.798Z


The proposal is to motivate children to use active methodologies with which they discover that this subject is an entertaining and interesting subject. One key: the kitchen is a good tool


Mathematics is not for the summer ... surely many students who already enjoy their well-deserved vacations will say that.

But is that true?

We know that at present and for quite some time they have not enjoyed a good reputation and have a compromised image among students, explains Alba Rodríguez Agüero, director of Educational Innovation at PossibleLab

:

“They understand it as a difficult subject and without real applications due to the majority of the content that is shown to them in the classrooms.

That is why many of them attend these classes with a preconceived idea that does not help them to face the subject adequately, often creating difficulties, which will coexist with them throughout their educational stage, generating a great disinterest and not showing any kind of effort in trying to understand them ”.

More information

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The usefulness of mathematics

But there is a reality that is indisputable. “Mathematics is useful and a lot. They are all around us, in any type of activity that we carry out. Therefore, the key is to make sense of mathematics ”, adds Rodríguez. “It is important”, continues the expert, “to transform the concept that our students and society in general have about mathematics as a science and abstract learning, identified exclusively with calculations and operations. Mathematics must become something attractive, that allows understanding the environment and that provides important resources for the solution of diverse problematic situations ”.

The proposal then to motivate children and adolescents is that they use active methodologies with which they discover that Mathematics is an entertaining, interesting subject and that it has an indispensable application in daily life, more specifically in their own routine and that they can understand the usefulness they have and what they can serve them for in their day to day.

The kitchen

What does math have to do with cooking?

In principle the question seems somewhat complicated, and more so for students of these courses.

So we may get a lapidary answer: NOTHING.

"But if we stop to think about cooking, about how to prepare a dish, the first thing that comes to mind is the term recipe," explains Rodríguez. “The recipe is a set of well-defined, ordered and finite instructions or rules that allows an activity to be carried out through successive steps that facilitates the process for the person who wishes to elaborate it. That is, it leads to a final state, a solution, an algorithm. In such a way we can affirm that, with only a brief introduction, we have already found the first pre-established relationship between both subjects ”, he maintains.

“However,” he continues, “this is still a long way from practice, which is what we want to demonstrate to the students.

If we calmly make them reconsider, they will see that we can find many aspects that relate them.

For example, to cook it is necessary to measure quantities such as mass, capacity, temperature and time.

In addition, it is necessary to use numbers of all kinds, naturals, decimals and fractions ”.

It is even necessary, as he maintains, many times, to use proportions for our recipes, since we depend on the number of diners who are going to attend.

"Cooking is an almost exact science on many occasions, especially when we get into the sweet kitchen, in which we have to go with precision and use formulas in our recipes

"

, according to several highly qualified pastry chefs.

“Some time ago I read a phrase, ideal to demonstrate the need for an activity like this for students. This sentence was written by a Secondary teacher who teaches this subject: “To teach fractions you have to cut cakes and apples. Otherwise, the students add numerator with numerator and denominator with denominator and they do not understand anything ”, adds the expert.

Another great reference in the kitchen that uses mathematics as a fundamental tool in the preparation of his recipes is Martín Berasategui. A few years ago, the documentary

The kitchen of numbers was released,

in which he showed the importance of this competition for his daily activity, the kitchen. Thanks to the accuracy, the unit conversion, the basic calculation and the operating algorithms of many of his appliances, he managed, together with his creativity and culinary skills, to become one of the most recognized chefs in the world.

So we propose to take advantage of the summer to see it with mathematical eyes. "Prepare recipes with your children or nephews with their favorite dishes and discover how each step by step of that recipe is a mathematical operation with a real application", the expert emphasizes. “Find a recipe that they like and propose to cook it for a different number of diners for whom it is written. In this way you will work on proportionality. Through basic calculations they will get to know the new amounts of ingredients ”, he continues.

But we can go a step further, “transform the quantities of the ingredients to different types of units.

In this way, they will be forced to carry out conversions of units of average.

And if you have a great variety of states in the ingredients, the units of measurements will be different.

Quite a challenge! ”, Concludes Rodríguez.

Are you up for it?

Add, subtract, multiply ... Cook!

We leave you a recipe that can help you start this great mathematical-culinary challenge.

COOKIES WITH CHOCOLATE PEPPERS (6 UNITS)

INGREDIENTS: 1 egg; 125 g of butter; 1 cup of sugar; 1½ cups of flour (it is prepared using 1¼ teaspoon of yeast and 5 grams of salt for each cup of regular flour or 5 grams of salt) and 50 grams of chocolate chips.



PREPARATION:


1. Preheat the oven to 180 ° C.


2. Beat the egg and sugar together until a thick, frothy consistency is achieved.


3. Melt the butter and add to the egg mixture.


4. Add the flour, salt and chocolate chips. Mix well.


5. Spoon batter (one heaping tablespoon per cookie) onto baking sheet lined with parchment paper.


6. Bake for 10 minutes. Let the cookies cool in the slit.


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Source: elparis

All news articles on 2021-08-13

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