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Wilkes University’s Women Empowered By Science
Kaylee Dixon, complete with a brain cap, finishes icing a cake in different colors to represent the different lobes of the brain during one of many hands-on labs for middle and high school students at Wilkes University’s Women Empowered By Science this week. Mark Guydish | Times Leader
Empowering Young Women in Science
WILKES-BARRE — They can program robots, they can work with stuff that’s like ash when you grab it but like liquid when you leave it alone, or they could eat brains.
It’s not everyday you enter a classroom full of middle school women and hear things like “Bring your brain to the front of the room!” “Look at my beautiful brain, guys!” “I don’t want to eat my brain!” and “That’s the most organized brain here!”
Um, let’s start with “I don’t want to eat my brain!” Kaylee Dixon wasn’t complaining about the taste of dendrites and axons. She had a simple reason for the comment. “I don’t like cake.”
Cake Brains Lab
Yes, we’re talking about cake brains, as in edible cakes shaped roughly like a human brain. And the students from middle schools throughout the region were participating in the “Cake Brains” Lab, one of many offerings this week during Wilkes University’s annual “Women Empowered By Science” event, which runs through Friday. Students from grades 7-12 get ample opportunities for hands-on training in all things science, from viscosity (the ash vs. liquid stuff) to robotics, pharmacy, genetics, and anthropology (to name a few), all neatly disguised as fun.
The cake brain lab involved a little talk about what different parts of the brain do, with diagrams of the four main lobes — frontal, parietal, temporal and occipital — in different colors. Then they got to recreate the color scheme — faithfully or with different hues — by applying food coloring to white icing and spreading it, with varying degrees of success, on the brain-shaped cake, trying to mimic the placement of the different lobes.
If they happened to take a lick of the icing, they were told, they were using their parietal lobes.
Once the cake brain models were done, some of them were chosen as best and brought to the front of the class for a hands-up or down vote on which was the best. Kaylee’s confection got the most votes, even if she wasn’t going to taste it.
Others did cut into their — well, let’s call them cerebral creations. But Caitlyn Vital decided to save hers.
“I love my brain,” she announced. “I’m going to take it home and feed it to my brother!”
Mmmmm, brains!
