Food Engineering Students' Creative Experiences in a Capstone Course

Abstract

This paper describes several creative experiences (and corresponding assessments) in a Food Product Development capstone course for Food Engineering students at Universidad de las Américas Puebla (UDLAP). This course was designed in order for them to experience a real work environment, where they have the opportunity to think and act as experts in the field do, and included several problem-solving learning environments (PSLEs)1 . Course main goal is that students design and develop a new food product involving idea generation, formulation, process selection, nutritional facts and label, shelf-life estimation, costs, sensory evaluation, among many others aspects of its development. Students were organized into teams of two members; the group had a total of eight students (3 male). Course activities were designed for student teams to work independently in the required labs depending on their product selection; however, several course sessions and meetings with the course instructor were planned in order to promote creativity including lessons and selected exercises that provided a number of techniques to help them generate innovative solutions to the correctly defined problem. These techniques include brainstorming, vertical and lateral thinking, analogies, TRIZ (Russian acronym for Resheniya Teoriya Izobretatelskikh Zadach, that translated literally is "theory of the resolution of inventionrelated tasks"), and SCAMPER (acronym for Substitute, Combine, Adapt, Modify, Put to another use, Eliminate, and Reverse) 2 .In this context, a creativity test at the beginning and end of the semester was applied. The test is a self-assessment that consists of 16 questions that are grouped into 5 categories of analysis that are related to the five steps that are part of the effective creative process proposed by Csikszentmihalyi 3 : 1) Finding problems (preparation), 2) Gathering and reflecting on information (incubation), 3) Problem exploration (insight), 4) Generating and evaluating ideas (evaluation), and 5) Implementation (elaboration). Furthermore, a group of experts in the field were invited to evaluate final projects and developed food products by means of the Creative Thinking VALUE Rubric, which is made up of a set of attributes that are common to creative thinking across disciplines 4 . Instructor-, peer-, and self-assessments were also performed throughout the course and on final project. Additionally, a Specific Course Rubric that included technical aspects regarding food product development as well as abilities of the team to present their product and answering questions raised during oral and poster presentations as well as during tasting of developed food products was utilized 5 .An increase in the scores for every category of the creativity test 3 applied at the beginning and end of the semester was observed. However, according to Csikszentmihalyi an effective creative process should follow the five steps in the mentioned order 3 . At last, in order to identify the students' perceptions with regards to t...

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“…This suggests that introducing and using the IPPD tool is not enough. Drawing on the literature, the authors propose that explicit connections need to be made between problem-solving and the creative process ( Lopez-Malo et al, 2016 ; Schmidt and Charney, 2018 ). Approaches to explicitly assess creativity that have worked in other higher education contexts include the use of well-defined rubrics to define performance standards of creativity and their use in student self-assessment, to clarify desired performance standards and assist students in building reflective practice ( Felder and Brent, 2010 ; Lopez-Malo et al, 2016 ).…”

“…Indeed, the expression of creativity is aligned with its disciplinary context ( Fautley, 2018 ). In engineering, one definition of a creative thinker is someone who “while demonstrating a solid knowledge of the parameters of the domain in the highest levels of performance, pushes him or herself beyond those limits by means of new, unique or atypical combinations; discovering or critically perceiving new synthesis, and using or recognizing risk-taking to achieve a creative solution” ( Lopez-Malo et al, 2016, p. 3 ). This aligns with the understanding by the lecturers of the course discussed in this paper, that creativity is the ability of students to design processes or products that show adaptability, functionality, and disrupt current models or ways of thinking or doing.…”

“…The IPPD was the pedagogical means for promoting creativity and teamwork in the course discussed in this paper. It provided a logical and reasoned approach to solving problems, which is regarded as one aspect of creativity ( Lopez-Malo et al, 2016 ; Schmidt and Charney, 2018 ). The IPPD tool was also used to support the development of teamwork skills in a wide variety of controlled and uncontrolled scenarios where the “learned practice” ( Jorgensen et al, 2019 ) of teamwork and its components such as positive interdependence, individual accountability, interpersonal skills, and group processing could be built ( Roger and Johnson, 1994 ).…”

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“…Recognize the value of divergent or contradictory perspectives and to integrate them (Eppes, Milanovic, and Sweitzer 2012;Lopez-Malo et al 2016;Vila-Parrish et al 2016) Active learning (n = 3)…”

“…Attain strategies and skills within a particular domain (Eppes, Milanovic, and Sweitzer 2012;Lopez-Malo et al 2016) Self-initiated exploration (n = 1)…”