Introduction
Popcorn. Depending on your age, different images spring to mind. Maybe it’s a buttery bucket dancing across a drive-in theater screen or the magical Jiffy Pop commercial from the 1970s. For most students today, if it is made at home, it comes in a microwaveable bag, usually pre-seasoned. Americans eat 90% of all the popcorn produced in this country, yet very few ever stop to think about what makes popcorn pop.
As noted French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss once said, “the scientific mind does not so much provide the right answers as ask the right questions.” As teachers, when we present students with a phenomenon, our goal should not be to have students give us a single textbook answer. Instead, what we really want is for them to generate a series of questions. It is from their own attempts to answer those questions that they will come to make sense of the world around them. In this unit, my goal is to demonstrate how investigating what makes popcorn pop can lead to a better understanding of thermodynamics and molecular interactions at the middle school level.
I am currently a sixth grade science teacher at Henry B. DuPont Middle School, a comprehensive public middle school in the Red Clay School District. It has approximately nine hundred students distributed over the sixth through eighth grade band. H. B. is located in a suburban setting but draws from both the city of Wilmington and the suburbs of Hockessin and Newark with a present composition of forty percent city and sixty percent suburban. Our feeder pattern consists of eight different elementary schools. There is a great disparity between the urban and suburban students on average when it comes to academic readiness and diversity of background knowledge. It is not a matter of potential ability but previous opportunities and, in some cases, differing expectations. The academic range in science has further been extended by increasing the amount of inclusion.
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