Eating in class encouraged for U of A student chocolate engineers

University of Alberta students showed off projects on Wednesday that delve into the properties of chocolate and how atoms and molecules make the sweet treat beh

That perfect ‘snap’ of a chocolate bar isn’t an accident; it’s the result of engineering.

That’s just one of several amazing things about the production of the popular sweet that 23 students at Edmonton’s University of Alberta discovered this semester during their chemical and materials engineering class devoted to the topic of chocolate engineering.

The goal of Dr. Beth Sterling Lee’s undergraduate special topics class wasn’t to teach students to become master chocolatiers, rather to “use material science and engineering to explain what happened at the atomic, microstructural and crystal scales.”

“Normally, we’re working with ceramics and glasses and polymers, carbon fiber, iron, aluminum, that kind of thing, then all of a sudden you go, ‘Oh, we can study chocolate. You can get course credit for studying chocolate,’” Sterling Lee told CTV News Edmonton on Wednesday. “I think that piqued a lot of people’s interest, and unlike every other class, we’re allowed to eat in the lab.”

Students spent their classes trying to perfect their chocolate so it could get to a certain stage of hardness without melting in one’s hands but would melt in one’s mouth. Not unlike catchphrases for certain popular chocolate brands.

Sterling Lee said the students test chocolate using the same equipment they use for testing metals, ceramics, polymers and other materials to determine if the chocolate is strong enough, breaks cleanly and has the right crystal structure.

“But it’s also cool, because at the same time, you can confirm it by eating it at the same time,” Sterling Lee said.

With files from CTV News Edmonton’s Dave Mitchel