How Designing Meaningful Project-Based Learning Is Like Baking Brownies

When designing learning experiences, it is easy for educators to get fixated on the What—"What will the students learn?" We list out the standards, the concepts, and the vocabulary.

But to create truly impactful learning, we must also focus on the Why.

• Why do they need to learn this?

• What problem could they solve?

• What could they create?

I like to think of this as the “Brownie” within the educational context. Traditional lessons often feel like we are just handing students individual ingredients—flour, sugar, eggs. But lessons need to be designed so that students don’t just hold the ingredients; they mix, heat, and blend them to bake a brownie.

A Case Study

Let’s look at a concrete example using Grade 5 Science standards focused on the Structure and Properties of Matter. Students are required to know:

• 5-PS1-1: Matter is made of particles too small to be seen.

• 5-PS1-2: Regardless of heating, cooling, or mixing, the total weight of matter is conserved.

• 5-PS1-3: Identifying materials based on their properties.

• 5-PS1-4: Mixing two or more substances results in new substances.

In a traditional setting, each of these standards would have its own set of isolated lessons or experiments. Students learn about particles. Then, they learn about conservation of weight. But because there is no “brownie” at the end—no opportunity to use these skills in a relevant way—these lessons just feel like separated ingredients.

The Real-World Connection 

To fix this, we need to explore how these skills are used by professionals. After some research, I found that Product Development Chemists use this exact set of knowledge to engineer personal care products.

So, instead of just asking students to memorize that “mixing substances creates new substances,” what if we asked them to act as chemists?

What if the “brownie” was a challenge to develop their own hand sanitizer, mosquito repellent, toothpaste, or perfume? To do this, they must apply their understanding of matter, chemical reactions, and properties. They have to take the ingredients (the standards) and actually bake something.

Closing Thought 

By having students apply what they learned in an authentic way, we eliminate the dreaded question: “Why do we need to learn this?”

Think back to your own experience at school. When you recall your most engaging and memorable learning experiences, I bet you there was a brownie involved.