Where STEAM Meets the Summer Kitchen at Lockwood
At Lockwood STEAM Academy in Oakland, the summer kitchen offered another place to explore how things come together. Digital Dreamers partnered with BACR for five weeks of culinary classes, bringing food preparation into the school's summer enrichment program.
Same fruit, different possibilities
The menu included rainbow salad, banana split cups, mango crepe rolls, watermelon smoothies, and DIY ice cream. Fruit took on several roles across the recipes: part of a salad, a dessert topping, a crepe filling, or the base of a drink. A familiar ingredient could become something quite different depending on what happened next.
Those changes gave us useful teaching moments. How much filling belongs in a crepe? Which step comes before the ingredients are combined? Cooking puts questions like these into a project children can see through to a finished serving. The dishes were inviting, but the preparation was where the learning happened.
With Digital Dreamers, culinary offers a natural connection to measurement, sequence, and working with materials. Our summer program gave those ideas an everyday setting. Lockwood and BACR made room for a kind of hands-on learning that ended with a dish on the table, and, on the ice cream day, a particularly summery one.