Education academic cooks up Kelly’s Kitchen Science

An education expert has launched a series of home-schooling science videos to help parents engage, enthuse, educate and entertain their children during the third national lockdown. @PlymUni

Kelly Davis, Lecturer in Science Education at the University of Plymouth, has created ‘Kelly’s Kitchen Science’, which provides a range of adapted experiments requiring only ingredients commonly found in the home.

From using sugar and washing up liquid to create bubbles that can be juggled, to demonstrating different densities of liquids with milk, oils and food dyes, the experiments are designed to be safe and suitable for all ages.

“Bringing science education into the home is perhaps the final frontier for learning outside of classroom or laboratory settings,”

says Kelly, a Programme Lead in Primary-level initial teacher training within the University’s Institute of Education.

“So through these videos, I want to show that there’s a variety of things you can do with your children to make science fun, which we know is absolutely key to inspiring them to learn about the subject.”

The idea for the video series came to Kelly after a number of friends asked her for home-schooling advice during the first lockdown, on what they could do with their children when it came to science.

She began to look at some of the practical experiments that students learn on initial teacher training degrees and set about reconfiguring them for a domestic setting, using ingredients such as cornflour, baking soda and vinegar, likely to be found in the average kitchen without the need to go shopping. Kelly said: