The course map.
Eight units — four per semester — the labs that anchor them, and the two-day rhythm that runs every week of the year. This is the planner’s view — the whole course on one page.
Two days a week, and the work between them.
Every unit runs on the same rhythm: Concept Day → [student works at home] → Investigation Day → [student synthesizes at home] → next Concept Day. One day forces a choice between depth and breadth; two days allow both. More than two crowds out the at-home work where integration actually happens.
Concept Day
- Arrival & warm-up — reconnect with the prior session
- Pre-lecture discussion — surface what the at-home reading raised
- Direct instruction — micro-lectures, worked problems, demonstrations
- Problem set / model work — apply the concept, solo or in pairs
- Misconception sweep & wrap-up — correct common errors, preview the lab
Guide's role: Socratic and diagnostic. Student's role: active participation; pre-reading required.
Investigation Day
- Pre-investigation briefing — the question, the method, the data
- Safety & setup check — food samples, reagents, and measurement tools ready, every time
- Setup — nutrition data, food logs, and partner assignment
- Execution — the investigation itself; the guide circulates and coaches
- Debrief & lab notebook — completed before the student leaves
- Cleanup & data logging — recorded to the dataset; non-negotiable
Guide's role: data coach first, teacher second. Student's role: the lab notebook is THE artifact — predictions before results.
From body systems to health decisions.
The sequence is deliberate: each unit assumes the one before it. Click any unit to open its mastery rubric — the standard a student demonstrates against to advance.
| Unit | Big ideas | Anchor lab(s) | Integrates with |
|---|---|---|---|
| 01 · Body Systems & Wellness Basics | The major body systems — circulatory, respiratory, digestive, nervous, musculoskeletal, immune — and how they work together; wellness as a whole-person baseline; reading your own baseline measurements as neutral data | A body-systems & wellness self-assessment | How we learned the body works, from Galen to modern physiology (history, reading); biology; resting-heart-rate & baseline-data math |
| 02 · Nutrients & the Science of Food | Macronutrients (carbohydrates, proteins, fats) and micronutrients (vitamins, minerals), and what each does in the body; food as energy and building blocks — type and amount matter, not the category | Food-nutrient testing — starch (iodine), sugar (Benedict's), fat (grease spot), vitamin C (indophenol) | The discovery of vitamins (history, writing); reading nutrition data; nutrient-percentage math |
| 03 · Digestion, Metabolism & Energy Balance | How the body breaks food down and extracts energy; the calorie as a unit of energy the body needs; energy balance as energy in vs. energy out, framed as science, not a diet prescription | A calorie & energy-balance calculation | Lavoisier & the first metabolism experiments (history); applied math: energy balance & unit conversion |
| 04 · Building a Healthy Diet | Reading nutrition labels, serving sizes, and ingredient lists; planning balanced meals with evidence and a plate model, not fad diets; the liver and kidneys already clear the body, so “detox” cleanses are unnecessary | A meal-planning & label-analysis project | How dietary guidelines evolved (history, data); geography of food access; plotting & comparing label data |
| 05 · Physical Fitness & Exercise Science | Components of fitness (cardiovascular endurance, strength, flexibility); heart rate, recovery, and how the body adapts to activity; measuring fitness with data, focused on function and evidence, never on physique or looks | Fitness measurement (heart rate, recovery) | The rise of exercise science (history); how the body adapts to training (biology); heart-rate & recovery-data math |
| 06 · Mental Health & Stress | The stress response, sleep, and mental well-being, framed supportively and without judgment; self-tracking sleep and stress as data; reaching out to trusted adults and professionals, not self-diagnosis | A stress & sleep self-tracking investigation | The history of stress science, from Hans Selye onward (history, writing); the biology of sleep; self-tracking data & statistics |
| 07 · Disease, Immunity & Prevention | How the immune system works, how diseases spread, and evidence-based prevention such as hygiene and vaccination; modeling how a disease moves through a population | Immunity & disease-transmission modeling | James Lind & the scurvy trial, the first controlled clinical trial (history, ethics, writing); statistics of controls & comparison groups |
| 08 · Health Decisions, Media & Consumer Science | Evaluating health claims in media and advertising; correlation vs. causation, since a headline showing a link does not prove cause; why supplements cannot replace whole food; becoming an evidence-first consumer of health information | A health-claim media-analysis case study | How health misinformation spreads (history, media literacy, writing); reading studies & statistics; correlation-vs-causation reasoning |
Every unit carries the core spokes — History, Reading, and Writing — anchored to the story in the integration guide. The column above names each unit’s distinctive spokes; geography and soft social studies run where they fit, and students pick from elective spokes (data, ethics, economics, technology, art). An applied-math lane runs through every unit too — math used in service of the science, never as a separate program.
Where mastery gets proven in person.
Three times across the year, the student steps up to a demonstration that cannot be faked, outsourced, or generated. These are the AI-proof core of the course — understanding, shown in real time, against a rubric, in front of a guide.
Nutrition-analysis defense
Analyze a real diet or food using nutrition data and defend an evidence-based recommendation, out loud, under questions.
Timed label-and-data reading
Read nutrition labels and health data under time pressure and separate the science from the marketing.
Oral lab-notebook defense
Walk a guide through your own notebook: the question, the method, the data, the anomalies, the interpretation.