Media Hub

McDonogh students are LifeReady. What does this mean? We teach students how to think, not what to think, empowering them to lead lives of consequence and do the greatest good.
LifeReady Skills Achieved: Creative & Critical Thinking | Communicating | Collaborating | Connecting

For the past two years, students in Melanie Batarseh's Upper School chemical engineering elective have spent weeks working through one of chemistry's most versatile reactions: fermentation. Using yeast as a catalyst to speed up the process, they convert sugar into ethanol. It’s the same fundamental reaction that happens in a brewery, just with a different end goal. At the gas pump, ethanol is an alternative fuel source. At the brewery, it becomes beer. In Batarseh's classroom, it becomes the foundation for learning how chemical engineers think and work.

The fermentation unit covers the full range of core chemical engineering concepts: designing and analyzing experiments, tracking every material and unit of energy that moves through a system, creating process flow diagrams that map each step of production, and understanding the instruments and controls that keep those processes running. Once the fermentation is complete, students then filter and distill the ferment to produce a more pure and concentrated ethanol solution. Finally, they put it to the ultimate test by lighting it on fire to confirm it will actually burn as a fuel.

To bring these concepts to life at full scale, on Tuesday, April 21, the class visited Heavy Seas Brewery, founded by McDonogh alumnus Hugh Sisson ‘72. There, brewmaster Chris Leonard led a tour tailored to the technical side of the operation. Students saw large-scale versions of the same equipment they work with in the lab — mixers, fermentation tanks, filtration systems — and learned about everything from raw material delivery to wastewater treatment, a topic they had studied earlier in the year. They also got a look at the quality control lab, where they saw that much of the analysis was. similar to what they do in the classroom, such as measuring ethanol concentration.

“After studying fermentation at School, visiting the brewery was a perfect opportunity for students to experience the process on a large scale,” says Batarseh. “We can simulate industrial processes with chemistry-lab glassware, but nothing can replace actually seeing the real thing. And, as the brewmaster pointed out to the students, fermentation is part science and part art. Many challenges arise in the classroom experiments that involve chemical engineering problem-solving, and they are hearing from a professional that the problem- solving doesn’t go away in a fully-operational, commercial production facility."

McDonogh’s robust STEM programs develop intellectual confidence, creative problem-solving, and technical fluency in every student. The coordinated pathway from kindergarten to twelfth grade ensures that students do not restart their learning at each level; they advance. Beginning in the Lower School, students explore CAD, robotics, and guided tool safety. The program grows in Middle School with independence in design and fabrication to Upper School mastery of advanced systems, culminating in a Capstone experience where seniors tackle real community challenges in collaboration with Greatest Good McDonogh and 800-Acre Labs.