Learning and a whole lot of fun was had by grade 8 students during a recent biology lab class on calorimetry. Thanks to biology teacher Thomas Artiss, the students had the opportunity to run the perennial calorimetry lab, which involves burning food to estimate its caloric content. They also had the chance to warm their hands over roasting marshmallows!

It’s all about “kids doing science and having fun,” enthused Artiss, who used the lab experiment as an opportunity to teach his students about how calorimeters are used to determine the energy content of foods by burning them in an oxygen atmosphere and measuring the energy yield in terms of the increase in temperature of the calorimeter.