The Chocolate Curriculum: A Gateway to Materials Science and Engineering and Python Programming

Most incoming college students have little awareness of materials science and engineering (MSE) as a discipline, resulting in barriers to entry for a field central to modern technology. To address this gap, we designed a short course curriculum that introduced high school students to MSE concepts through accessible, hands-on, and computationally driven activities framed in the context of chocolate science. The curriculum, rooted in the Context-Based Learning framework, aimed to build scientific literacy and present an engineering perspective by linking everyday observations to the underlying materials science tetrahedron of "structure, process, properties, and performance" relationships. Students engaged in low-cost activities that explicitly connected to advanced laboratory techniques, such as differential scanning calorimetry and polarized optical microscopy, introducing them to tools that produce research-quality data but rely on the same principles. Computational modules introducing Python for modeling, quantitative analysis, and data visualization showed how computational skills can aid broader research efforts and enabled students to produce publication-quality figures and investigate hypotheses. This integrated experimental-computational approach with the chocolate theme lowered barriers to MSE, increased awareness of the field, and empowered students to become citizen scientists.