IN THE CLASSROOM:

Just take some water, add a little bit of sugar and yeast, mix thoroughly and voila, you have a science experiment at Newport Harbor High School.

No, the students weren’t learning how to bake bread Thursday. Teacher Matt Burns was giving the kids a lesson in biology, specifically how organisms break down high-energy molecules like sugar and transform it into energy.

The lesson also brought some energy into the classroom.

“It makes my job easier. It’s not the same monotonous material when you’re doing it,” Burns said as his students stared intently at test tubes of water. “You can only talk so much about it.”

Students put what they read in the textbook into action, filling four test tubes with warm tap water and yeast, then adding sugar to two of them before sealing them with a water balloon over the top.

If the yeast is a living organism, it should produce carbon dioxide as it uses the sugar and fills up the balloon.

“Through experiments like this, you can physically see if gas is being produced rather than reading it in a book,” Burns said. “It familiarizes them with the textbook material.”

Why use yeast?

Besides its convenience for simple experiments, yeast is used in everyday things like cheese and beer, giving the students perspective on how biology affects their lives.

Thursday’s experiment was only the first to use yeast.

Students later put yeast on a petri dish an added a solution to encourage growth so they could view its expansion under a microscope.

“This gives it tangibility. The cell side of life is the hardest to teach,” Burns said.

Burns likes to show his students real-life applications of science.

This year the students were told to find a “wild” place in Orange County, meaning the land should be undeveloped. In other words, no sprinklers, no people, just nature.

Students are going to track the location’s progress monthly to see how the plant life grows and the habitat changes.

“Doing active science, it makes it more interesting. I like this more than taking notes,” sophomore Kevin Huynh said.

JOSEPH SERNA may be reached at (714) 966-4619 or at [email protected].