Attracting Students to Chemical Engineering with Coffee: A Large Enrollment Lab and Design Experience

We describe a new class developed at U.C. Davis titled “The Design of Coffee,” which serves as a non-mathematical introduction to chemical engineering as illustrated by the process of roasting and brewing coffee. Hands-on coffee experiments demonstrate key engineering principles, including material balances, chemical kinetics, mass transfer, fluid mechanics, conservation of energy, and colloidal phenomena. The experiments lead to an engineering design competition where students strive to make the best tasting coffee using the least amount of energy – a classic engineering optimization problem, but one that is both fun and tasty. “The Design of Coffee” started as a freshmen seminar in 2013, and it has exploded in popularity: it now serves 1,533 students per year, and is the largest and most popular elective course at U.C. Davis. In this talk we focus on the class pedagogy, with an emphasis on how coffee serves as an engaging and exciting topic for teaching students about core scientific principles in an approachable, hands-on manner.