Beginning last summer, Grace Rhoten ’26, along with Madelyn Hart ’26, launched a baking summer camp for the local kids in Western Springs. Calling it Kitchen Chemist, they successfully ran baking sessions throughout the summer while aiming to teach the science of baking. This passion inspired the creation of Rhoten’s cookbook, Edible Engineering.

“We came up with this whole curriculum for it and a lot of activities,” Rhoten said. “I wanted to keep going after that ended and have a way to turn my recipes, family recipes, and other recipes that I’ve been working on into a cookbook that also explains the science, kind of like the camp.”

The book is divided into five different chapters, Rhoten said. The first chapter includes normal recipes for foods like brownies or cookies. It then features a page that explains how a certain ingredient can impact the final results. For example, how the eggs affect the texture of cookies.

“There’s a chapter on nutrition and a chapter on building things,” Rhoten said. “[Readers] can build a cupcake delivery car or a parachute for an egg and different things like that. There’s also a chapter for modeling. So like making DNA out of little marshmallows or like a key lime pie, but it has models of the organelles made out of candy on top.”

After seeing the impact of her camp and book, Rhoten founded an organization called Teens Teach STEM.

“I thought maybe this could reach other people,” Rhoten said. “We noticed in the camp [that], since you had to pay for the camp, it was only a certain group of kids that were able to go. And so then we realized, well, a lot of other kids should be able to learn this science. A lot of kids, and especially girls, I think, aren’t as interested or they don’t have the confidence to pursue STEM stuff because a lot of the existing things are maybe more directed towards boys.”

Teens Teach STEM has fundraised at several events in Western Springs, including the Chili Cook-off and the Halloween Hoopla. They have also been fundraising through GoFundMe and door-to-door sales of the book.

“I hope that in the coming years, Teens Teach STEM can become a full, official nonprofit,” Eleanor Meuer ‘28, member of the distribution team, said. “It’d also be really cool if we could consistently send out orders of our book to several places like food banks, churches, or schools.”

The organization consists of 12 kids, all sophomores. They’re divided into four different teams. There’s the finance, the distribution, the content, and the tech teams. At meetings, they come up with fundraising ideas, run the social media page, or edit videos.

“Teens Teach STEM creates a supportive environment for younger students through a non-threatening way of learning STEM,” Meuer said. “The use of baking to teach STEM makes seemingly complicated concepts a lot less intimidating and fun to learn. This also makes sure that even if a teacher isn’t directly teaching these STEM skills, it’s easy enough to understand.”

The organization’s goal this year was to raise enough money to donate 250 copies of Edible Engineering to the Westchester Food Pantry, Rhoten said. To do that, they need to raise around $2,500. As of right now, they have raised nearly $2,300.

“This was just kind of a way to make it fun and make a way for [children] to learn, even if they’re not gonna be interested in STEM, [and] think about the world more critically,” Rhoten said.