BOONES CREEK, JOHNSON CITY: During the 2024-2025 school year, Create Appalachia worked with Boones Creek Elementary School under a partnership program led by the Center of Excellence in STEM Education at ETSU (CESE). The CESE works to match STEM-based businesses and non-profits with local STEM teachers, and the partnerships give students a chance to work with their partners on “real-world” projects that help them build their skills.

Create Appalachia participated for the first time this year and hopes to participate again during the upcoming school year. Cher Cornett, founder of CA and retired professor of Digital Media at ETSU, worked with teacher Rachel Perry and her students at Boone’s Creek Elementary on a cookbook design project. The class at Boone Elementary was a diverse group of students from multiple grade levels (3-8). They wanted to create a cookbook to sell as a fundraiser for those affected by hurricane Helene.

Cornett noted that, “This project involved several different graphic design skills at different levels. At the beginning of the project, I spoke with the students about what creative directors and graphic designers do and broke down how a designer goes about finding solutions for communication or product designs. I also talked about the kinds of classes they might want to take in preparation for college if they were interested in design as a career. Since their plan was to create a cookbook, I used that as the example.”

“We started by going over all of the tasks that would need to be done throughout the project,” Cornett said, ” from design concept to collecting and testing recipes, to food styling and photography, to copywriting and editing, to cookbook design and print production, and then marketing. Then we broke down how to form task-related teams that would take advantage of each student’s interests and talents.”

The team then discussed how to create a production schedule based on the 6-month timeline they had to complete the project. Following this, Cornett presented examples of well-designed cookbooks and explained what made the designs work from a marketing point of view. A brainstorming session followed, with the students deciding what type of cookbook they planned to develop and how to make it attractive to buyers. The students ultimately decided to make their cookbook a collection of family favorite recipes, with comfort food as the central theme. Each recipe would be accompanied by a story.

Unfortunately, after the holidays several setbacks–including weather, illness, and scheduling glitches–the cookbook was postponed. However, the students did cook for the entire faculty and staff at Boone’s Creek and they utilized the design concepts they learned from Cornett. Several of the students who were in Ms. Perry’s STEM class took the lessons a little farther, learning how to stage 3d concepts using the design process Cornett introduced. Ultimately, the team scaled back and are creating and marketing cutting boards and aprons with catch words.

“I enjoyed this a lot,” said Cornett, ‘and I hope that we have an opportunity to work with the CESE on a project like this again.”