Food for Thought: The Cookie Analogy
Download the Cookie Analogy PDF [522KB]
Variations and extensions of this activities are located on the Access Excellence site.
Food for Thought: The Cookie Analogy was originally written to introduce a unit on heredity at the high school level. It can be easily adapted for other grade levels or to include other topics. The Cookie Analogy is an activity in which the familiar is used to explain the unfamiliar. The familiar in this case would be cookies and cookie recipes, while the unfamiliar would be many biological concepts, including phenotype and genotype. The familiar becomes a model which can be used to help students construct meaning for concepts that often prove to be difficult to learn. It is highly adaptable, as basic concepts such as heredity and environment can be discussed without having to use a great deal of terminology. It can also be used to help students construct meaning for terms that may be commonly used, but often misunderstood.
As a part of the activity, the students are given the assignment to bake one of four cookie recipes and bring one dozen of the cookies to school. Several days should be allowed before the date of the classroom portion of the activity, to provide adequate time to obtain ingredients and do the baking. Although a majority of students may wish to make a particular cookie, such as the ever-popular chocolate chip, each of the four recipes should be equally represented.
The ingredients of the four recipes have been selected for specific reasons. For example, the two cookies (oatmeal raisin and oatmeal chocolate chip) that have the most similar phenotypes (appearances) actually differ the most in terms of their recipes or genotype (genetic makeup). The relationship of having a similar appearance and very different recipe is analogous to the relationship between the black and panda bear. In appearance, both bears look similar. However, each has a very different DNA recipe.