Project Pizza

How might we engage students in after school activities? After talking with the high school students at Detroit Community High School, we realized that not all of them necessarily want to go home after school. Statistics show that in the 1/5 of students in the United States have no where to go after school.

With our modern society being more and more pressed for time, fewer and fewer parents are passing on cooking skills down to the next generation and less value is placed on it than in the past. We do not intend to force children to make time for cooking or even to like cooking, but simply provide them an option, open doors to a new possibility that may have not been presented to them before, so they may decide whether it is something they would like to make time for. With an engaging, experiential, hands on process we can tangibly teach children the how-to’s of basic cooking, the concept as well as introduce aspects of health education.
The pizza is a great candidate for creativity, because there are endless possibilities and combinations of ingredients and toppings. We hope that our pizza oven will inspire creativity and interest in both the process of cooking and food itself.

Our pizza oven and cooking space has the potential to encourage entrepreneurship among students. Since pizzas are easy to make and universally popular amongst out 9th grade partners, the pizza oven can provide the students of Detroit Community High School with the opportunity to make and sell pizzas to their peers, teachers, and parents.

Nairi Bagdasarian, Chris McKenzie, Ran Li, Alana Hoey, Allyson Zelinski, Vaishu Ilankamban