The Soup Factory

Abstract

In the last century, when I was a graduate student, my friend Jenny and I volunteered at a local elementary school by providing STEM enrichment sessions once a week. We ran through the standard outreach activities - playing with the non-Newtonian-ness of water and cornstarch^[1]*; cross-linking classroom glue; designing “safety” suits so an egg could survive being dropped from the jungle gym……. All manner of fun engineering and science activities that are appropriate and educational for 5-7 year old kids. We were well into our second year of volunteering when it struck us that we’d done lots of things that were pieces of chemical engineering - polymer science, fluid mechanics, engineering design - but nothing that actually was chemical engineering (had the AIChE K-12 resources existed at the time, we absolutely would have ^[2]). But as they did not, we were on our own to find a way to convey the idea that our profession is the one where we design, operate, improve, and maintain processes for chemical transformation of raw materials into finished products!