Group 4 Project Help - Kitchen Science

[Negi]

Hi people,

 

So I have a group 4 project whose theme is Kitchen Science. My group consists of chemists and biologists. My idea was to measure the fat, protein, carbohydrate and fiber content of several foods from our school canteen. Yet while researching, there is no way to measure the contents of fat, protein, carbohydrate and fiber using the technology of our school (it requires a bomb calorimeter and other high-end equipment not normally found in high schools). 

 

So what other ideas you guys suggest me to do (topic is Kitchen Science)? Or do you know an alternative way to measure protein, fat, carbohydrate and fiber in foods? 

P.S. It must be achievable in 16 hours time (2 full school days)

 

Thanks!

Edited September 6, 2014 by Negi

[Sandwich]

Can you not pick a better theme? It makes more sense to settle on a theme only after you've come up with things you can definitely do, rather than come up with a theme where you can't personally think of any experiments. The group 4 project is totally open, there's no need to pick any topic that presents a challenge to you.

[flinquinnster]

Whilst I'm sure this varies, our school chose our Group 4 theme, so we didn't have much of a choice in changing the theme even though it was pretty rubbish. So if you are able to change your theme, that's great, but if you can't, then you do have to stick with 'kitchen science'. Even within that theme of kitchen science, you should be able to find quite a lot of ideas even though some - like the one you mentioned - might not be feasible. For instance, anything dealing with kitchen equipment or even just food in general would be fair game. 

 

Although I'm not sure this is terribly good advice, Group 4 project was a bit of a joke at our school. As long as we pretended to have done work, didn't break any important lab equipment, and wrote up some decently reflective evaluations I don't think they cared what we did.  

[Negi]

Yep I'm sorry to say but that's what my school chose so there's no changing it. 

 

And to @flinquinnster , my school is the same. They don't care what we do, as long as we present it in the end of the day.

 

The difficult thing is it needs to be biology, or the group can't work due to them all picking only 1 science and that science is biology.It must also not be too hard as my group members tend to not be strong in the sciences. I do have ideas such as measuring the pH content of each food to determine whether it would cause stomach cramps, but the teacher kept warning me that it must be done in 16 hours (which is a bit long for that experiment).

 

I'm all out of ideas right now, as most of the ideas I thought up are already taken by other groups.

[Sandwich]

That sucks. Well, we did 'fruit' as our Group 4 project. I think for Biology I printed out a load of random Wikipedia stuff about taste to make a poster, but for Chemistry I did some kind of experiment using bananas and ethylene for ripening. If you can argue bananas live in the kitchen and therefore it's kitchen science, that ripening experiment is eminently google-able I just did one I found online.

[Thrashmaster]

My school really messed up the Group 4 Projects. The more I read about what other people did, the more I realize that. We essentially just did a research project. Not a single experiment was done by anyone. We had no class time, but it was assigned two weeks before. We were given a topic, and so we researched what other people thought could be done. Luckily the rubric is about group skills and not content

 

As for you, that's a tough one. The first thing that comes to my mind is to identify some chemical reaction that takes place during cooking, and then take samples and measure that several times throughout the cooking process. Then, you can make a rate of reaction curve. Something like that