Hi everyone, I’m glad that you come back to check our third post!!!!

Are you curious about how to make high school students like chickpeas?

Here is what we did; we made hummus dip!!!

Our objective this week was to get an idea of what students like for snacks from the first survey and make an improved snack recipe with healthier alternatives. However, when we went to pick up the surveys this Monday, the feedback was not what we expected.Our community partner said that the kids found it overwhelming to have surveys that were short answer questions because a lot of them just wrote “I don’t know” and so there was no clear answer or opinion for our group to use. Moreover, many students don’t like chickpeas and refuse to try them, which resulted in a lot of leftovers.

To be honest, we did feel a little disappointed because the recipe that we provided did not satisfy the students Tupper. The good thing is, this experience makes us to think more about the reality. The students at Tupper don’t have as much nutritional knowledge as we do. The teachers there are not LFS graduates. It is unrealistic to make them suddenly start to eat healthy and nutritious food according to our standards. Therefore, we decided to make some changes from our original plan and adapt some ideas for the homework club leaders because they understand the students’ preferences much better than us.

This reminds me about Dan Barber’s story from the podcast (452: Poultry Slam 2011). Adapting a new method into the environment takes time. And there will be a lot of unexpected challenges throughout the process. For Dan Barber, it took him 3 years trying to adapt the new method to raise his geese and it still has not succeed every time. For us, we only have 4 sessions in total to help the school to take in this healthy eating idea. It is normal to experience some difficulties because we learn the most from our challenges. The key to success is to learn and adapt.

Therefore, on Wednesday’s session, our group made hummus dip with chickpeas and tahini (so that we could use up the chickpea leftovers from last week) and tzatziki dip with yogurt and dill. For chips, we bought veggie and rice chips for students to try different chip alternatives.
For those who were interested in the dip recipes, here’s are the links: http://www.inspiredtaste.net/15938/easy-and-smooth-hummus-recipe/

http://natashaskitchen.com/2013/10/10/tzatziki-sauce-recipe/

There were 5 student volunteers and a community worker who came to help us chop vegetables, measure and mix the ingredients. Students were hesitant to try the new dips at first, but because they tasted the dips with a familiar food like chips, and because they were involved in the cooking process, they were more comfortable in trying a new food!

We also took an idea from the Tupper community team to plan a “blindfold taste test” activity, which will be held on Thursday. The teacher will handout different milk samples (skim, 2%, goats, soy and almond) to students and ask simple questions like how many different kinds of milk have you tried? What kind of milk is you favorite? At the end of the activity, they will count up the total preferences for each kind of milk and determine preference % to see if any students are surprised by their picks. A simple questionnaire will be given out just as last time, but with short answer questions substituted by yes/no/neutral questions.

The 3rd visit to Tupper went really well. The ingredients only cost $40, which is perfectly under the $60 budget. The volunteers who came to help us seem to like our recipe and we hope the kids from homework club will like it too. The grocery shopping took quite a lot of time even with one person driving. Unfortunately, we won’t get anyone to drive on our next visit. Our community partners’ suggestion about this is to email them in advance to confirm the recipe and maybe other activities beforehand so our group can shop for foods before we arrive. We plan to pick up the surveys from homework club by next Monday and use the results to improve our next recipe. Some of our recipe ideas for the next session are english muffin pizza, pita and sauce, cheese and vege…….

If you got any ideas about tasty, healthy, inexpensive snack recipes, please feel free to leave us a comment. We are looking forward to see your ideas!!!!!!

References

Interview. Audio Blog Post. 452: Poultry Slam 2011. N.p., 2 Dec. 2011. Web. 22 Oct. 2015. Retrieved from http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radioarchives/episode/452/poultry-slam-2011?act=3#play
–Sharon Wang (on behalf of group 22: Shirley, Lucy, Vita, Sharon, Ya and Kelly)

Oct.23

Second School Visit–making chickpea salad sandwich!

Posted by xiaozi chen in Uncategorized

Hello there,

Welcome to our second blog post! In this week, we completed our second school visit out of the four flexible learning sessions.

The first weekly objective of our project is to collect data of students’ food preferences by distributing surveys and then analyze and draw a conclusion of the consumption trend based on the results. The results are used to modify and improve our well designed tasty, nutritious and economical recipe for the next visit. The second weekly objective is to integrate nutrition into the cooking session of the homework club by providing a recipe to them and help them prepare food materials required for Thursday. We aimed to introduce healthy substitutes for the unhealthy food ingredients that are commonly consumed by using posters to show comparisons between peanut butter and chickpeas as the filling of sandwich based on nutrition, such as calories and content of the major nutrients. Hopefully, students can get to know more about nutrition and embrace the idea of healthy eating after trying a new taste of sandwich with healthy legumes.

Let’s check out our nutritious recipe and poster for this week’s homework club.

Chickpea Salad Sandwich Spreading (using 19 oz chickpeas)

Ingredients:

½ onion (can replace with bell pepper for a lighter flavor)

1 celery stalk

1 can chickpeas

2 tbsp mayonnaise

1 tbsp lemon juice

1 tsp dried dill weed (optional)

some salt & pepper

After this week’s school visit, we get to know more about students’ preferences regarding to snacks provided in the homework club and their ideas towards our 1^st designed recipe. The analysis of students’ preferences is based on students’ answers to our survey questions. In our survey, we have general Questions as follows:

What are your favorite foods to eat?

What do you usually eat for lunch?

What is your favorite food that you consider healthy and why?

Do you cook for yourself at all? If so, what do you like to make?

What snacks would you like to eat at homework club?

Moreover, we will also receive some feedbacks from students’ answers to the questions that are designed specifically for the 1^st recipe and the questions are as follows:

Do you like PB&J sandwiches? Why?

Do you like chickpea salad sandwiches and want to eat them more often? If yes, is it because of the flavor or the nutrition values of chickpeas, or both? If no, why?

Do you want to eat chickpea salad sandwiches more often? Even more than PB&J?

We discussed our first Thursday workshop plan with the school teacher and the homework club coordinator on this Wednesday. Initially, however, the plan was not seen as applicable to help students achieve learning goals by the school teacher and this was because the interesting activities to attract students’ engagement were missed out from our workshop plan. Students’ engagement motivation would be depressed if the workshop was tedious. Game-based learning has become a significantly important issue in education because games may be highly useful for improvement of student’s active participation in learning by offering attractive and academic content (Hsieh et al., 2013). Ultimately, our group modified our workshop plan and incorporated some learning activities in our workshop plan, such as guessing game for food ingredients in the recipe. In future visits, I will recommend that more game-based learning activities are incorporated into the workshop to facilitate students’ learning.

Our objective for next week’s visit is to introduce natural healthy food ingredients to substitute commonly used sugar added to snacks. Moreover, we will try to get feedbacks of our next weeks’ workshop and students’ snacks preference. In order to achieve those goals, in next week’s visit, we will provide a recipe to the homework club and prepare the food required. Then questionnaires will be given to the teacher to help us distribute to students. In next week, we will make raw brownie ball. The questions based on next week’s recipe are as follows:

Do you like cocoa?

Can you list your favorite snack(s) made of cocoa?

Do you like nuts? Why?

What can we use to increase the sweetness of our food?

References

1. Hsieh, Y.; Lin, Y.; Hou, H. Exploring Elementary-School Students’ Engagement Patterns in a Game-Based Learning Environment. Journal of Educational Technology & Society 2015, 18, 336.

Updates coming soon!

–Kelly (Xiaozi) Chen (on behalf of group 22: Shirley, Lucy, Vita, Sharon, Ya and Kelly)

Oct.15

Cooking with Friends

The 3rd Visit to Tupper Secondary: Making Different Types of Dips With Student Volunteers!

Second School Visit–making chickpea salad sandwich!