The Efficacy of Maker Education and STEAM Content Delivery Through Cooking: A Case Study of the Chef Koochooloo Project

The research explores a multimodal platform and curriculum, Chef Koochooloo, that merges cooking instruction with the science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics (STEAM) approach to education. This curriculum and application uses narrative content emphasizing cuisines, cultures, and food from many countries, aiming to develop healthy cooking skills and enhance STEAM, nutrition, and human geography knowledge through food preparation. Further, the effectiveness of this approach toward maker education in developing student interest across disciplines is discussed. The experimental study consisted of a 10-week pilot study across 11 schools in California to test the effectiveness of this approach and curriculum. 259 students participated in this study. Narrative methods, semi-structured interviews, and multimodal analyses of platform and lesson iterations based on educational standards were used to evaluate this approach. Additionally, interviews with stakeholders reveal a set of challenges and affordances useful toward the analyses of maker education interventions as a whole.