School News ➤ Article 15526
Thumbnail Image for Article 15526Making Ice Cream in Mrs. Doane's PLTW Classes
Posted Date: 10/30/2017

It was another fun week in Mrs. Doane’s PLTW/STEM class. This week as a part of the Applied Chemistry Unit, students were learning about Ice Cream production and how careers in Chemistry and Chemical Engineering are involved in the development and manufacturing of ice cream. They also learned about the differences in a Chemistry degree versus a Chemical Engineering degree, and how people who work in these two professional careers do so collaboratively to use each other’s knowledge and strengths in order to develop and produce quality products. As a part of this unit students actually made ice cream in the lab setting in Ziploc bags. During this activity students collected temperature data prior to adding salt to their ice, and then at 5 minute intervals through the freezing process. This gave them gain a better understanding of the chemistry behind freezing point depression and how this helps to lower the freezing point of ice and make it possible to freeze their ice cream.  This same concept is why the road crews add ice to the streets in the winter when there is a threat of freezing precipitation. By spreading salt on the road it lowers the freezing point of the moisture and helps prevent the roads from becoming ice covered and slick. The students were also assigned different mixing methods and collected data that they would later use to compare their results and determine which method was the most successful in freezing the ice cream.iceiceiceiceiceiceiceice