Chocolate Across the Curriculum and Outreach

Abstract

CACAO (Chocolate Across the Curriculum and Outreach) is a vertical curriculum augmentation designed to help students across the ChE undergraduate program. The students use a chocolate-based food engineering lab to make connections between core chemical engineering topics using hands-on and project-based learning. Costs to create this component are very modest; our budget for capital and consumables is on the order of $4,000 and $1500 /yr afterward. The project started in a 300 sq. ft. lab and has expanded to 1200 sq. ft.