Overview and Teaching Resources
Lab 1 Introduction
We created this lab to help you connect diet and nutrition to the diabetes content you are learning about in your curriculum. This lab and online platform promote active learning through an affordable experiment, embedded hyperlinks, and embedded video content to make the classroom more exciting and accessible for all students no matter their physical location.
Before beginning the lab procedure, students are instructed to navigate through the online resources for the lab which can be found in the “Experiment #1: Carb Counting, Added Sugars, and Diabetes Content” tab . These are concepts you will need to understand prior to completing the lab procedure.
The virtual lab platform is meant to be interactive. This website gives you the ability to click on hyperlinks to further your understanding and watch videos to explain concepts. After you have read and interacted with this material, there is a pre-lab questionnaire to let you know your readiness to begin the lab procedure. At the end of the content page, you will also find the “Experiment #1 Answer Packet”. Students may download the answer packet to organize their lab data or they may simply write their answers out on paper if a printer is not available. Data collected from the experiment will not need to be physically passed in, however, it will be needed for reference in the post-experiment discussion board.
Once the content is reviewed and the prelab questionnaire indicates a student’s readiness, students may begin the lab procedure. This first lab covers topics of nutrition label analysis, gram to calorie calculations, carbohydrate counting, and measurement of added sugars in the diet. Students will analyze nutrition facts labels from some of their favorite snacks in their kitchen to gather this data. This lab is designed to be easily done from home and to provide an active lab experience for students during distance learning or anytime physically being in a classroom is not possible.
Lab 1 Objectives
From the completion of this lab, students will
- Synthesize multiple topics from their “in class material” together, into one lab, to demonstrate deeper comprehension of the material.
- Review the topic of diabetes in an interactive online platform where students will have access to video material and hyperlinks to aid learning.
- Connect nutrition and diet to the pathophysiology of diabetes development.
- Engage in a hands-on lab experience to physically see the added sugars in their own household snacks and beverages.
- Learn about carbohydrate counting and its importance in diabetes management.
- Practice reading food labels to perform calculations to convert grams of carbohydrate, total sugars, and added sugars into calories.
Lab 1 Timeline
Completion of this lab will take around 2 hours total. Students should use the first half-hour of time to explore the interactive website and read through the tab called “Experiment #1: Carb Counting, Added Sugars, and Diabetes Content”. This informative tab is laced with video content and hyperlinks to aid the students’ understanding of the lab material. Here, students will learn about diabetes and how its development and management relate to nutrition, as well as other skills/background information needed to understand the lab procedure and discussion questions. The second hour should be spent on the completion of the lab procedure. The final thirty minutes should be spent on completion of the post-lab discussion questions, posted to the collaborative discussion board.