To judge by appreciative comments around the classroom that evening, the brownies helped to sweeten up the crowd. And the arguments by members of The Insect Effect team for eating bugs — cheap, high in protein and more environmentally friendly than raising livestock — resonated with classmates.

But being fed free treats didn’t deter anyone from peppering the team with pointed questions about their idea for promoting entomophagy.

Encouraging that kind of animated give-and-take is partly what integrative biology professor Shoshanah Jacobs and Prof. Dan Gillis, School of Computer Science, had in mind when they got together to design the ICON course.

They also aim to help under-graduates cultivate three main skills that Jacobs says repeatedly rank tops in employer surveys: problem solving, knowledge transfer and translation, and teamwork.

Their solution introduced in 2015 is a self-directed course that challenges undergrads to take charge of their own learning. Participants also have to figure out how to work with counterparts from different areas across campus on a discipline-straddling problem. For the entire semester, ICON students work in teams of four or five on devising a solution to an important societal need.

“It’s a non-lecture, alternative teaching model,” says Jacobs, who sees herself and Gillis more as facilitators than as instructors. “It’s great to find ways to take students beyond their undergrad discipline.”

In 2015, student teams worked on ideas to help create net-zero energy houses. In winter 2016, groups worked on concepts for a mobile classroom lab connected to an “eco-learning” demonstration centre proposed for the Guelph Innovation District. Last fall, the theme was food security.

Students are graded individually on participation, communication and a research essay, and assessed group marks for preliminary and final project pitches.

Fourth-year geography student Brooke Ellison Wareing says the course has taught her about

teamwork, delegation and problem solving. Her group is working on an app to enable consumers to purchase low-cost restaurant leftovers to reduce food waste.

“You almost get to create the class yourself,” she says. “You decide what your goals are and how you want to achieve them.” – ANDREW VOWLES

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It comes as no surprise to Crerar that some of her first- and second-year students don’t know how to use kitchen appliances or even how to turn them on. They may have grown up in families that were too busy to prepare home-cooked meals and relied instead on take-out and frozen dinners.

“You definitely see the learning,” she says. “They gain that confidence because they know the ‘why’ of what’s happening. They’re able to adapt recipes and create their own recipes because they know how one ingredient interacts with other ingredients.”

Students not only learn the basics of cooking but also the science behind food preparation in class and food safety. They then apply their knowledge in a food lab, which consists of a fully-equipped kitchen and pantry. Whirlpool recently donated eight new stoves, a washer/dryer and a stand-mixer to the kitchen.

Not to be confused with U of G’s food science program, “Understanding Foods” is aimed at non-science students such as those in hospitality and nutrition – the course is a requirement for both degrees.

Students learn about a new food group each week and try recipes using those foods. They began the fall term learning about salads, followed by fruits, then vegetables. When cooking vegetables, Crerar recommends adding a small amount of lemon juice to Guelph’s alkaline water to keep them from getting slimy.

The baking component of the course teaches students how to use common ingredients found in cakes, muffins and desserts. “Even though they’re all the same ingredients, but in different ratios, you get a totally different product,” says Crerar, who studied nutrition at U of G and took the course she now teaches. The order in which ingredients appear in a recipe also matters. Adding lemon juice too early to a lemon meringue pie, for example, will turn it into soup.

As for grading, the proof of the pudding isn’t in the taste. Students are graded not on how well they executed a recipe but how well they demonstrated their learning of the material. Crerar can tell what their concoctions taste like by the looks on their faces.

“Accidents happen, but they learn from accidents,” she says. “Sometimes the accident is edible, sometimes not. There’s a learning opportunity in everything you do.”

What’s the most popular recipe? Crerar often gets emails from former students, asking her for the beef stew recipe they learned in class. “It comes out when they try to impress their significant other’s family.” – SUSAN BUBAK

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Speed and strategy, says Hartman. His program won 53 of 58 games in a round-robin tournament run by Prof. Stefan Kremer, School of Computer Science, for “Introduction to Intelligent Systems,” a third-year artificial intelligence (AI) course.

In the process, Hartman and his classmates learned more about AI — the ultimate goal for Kremer, who added the pop culture twist as another way to engage students in a regular course assignment to write chess-playing programs.

“My goal is to train students to be able to solve interesting computing problems,” says, Kremer. He adds that programming machines to play games is a longstanding tradition in AI courses.

His AI assignments already involved games, puzzles and problem-solving. For this project, he assigned students to write chess-playing programs modelled after a chess version developed by the character Sheldon on The Big Bang Theory.

Unlike Sheldon’s three-player game that uses a three-sided board, Kremer stuck with a simpler two-player version. But he borrowed the sitcom’s made-up chess pieces complete with their unorthodox properties. For example, the serpent “poisons” adjacent pieces and the catapult launches other pieces to land elsewhere on the board.

After his students wrote their programs, he pitted those agents against each other in an online, round-robin tournament of games lasting up to two minutes each.

“I liked the idea of competition,” says Hartman, who aimed to write a program that “thought” its way quickly through possible moves and counterattacks. “It’s chess but it’s more involved than chess. There’s a lot that could happen, a lot of moves to consider and different strategies.” – ANDREW VOWLES

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“How can I possibly top serial murders?” asks Prof. Geoff Stevens, who has taught “Corruption, Scandal and Political Ethics” for the past 10 years. The course draws about 200 students per term.

Topics include sex scandals and political privacy, the politics of lying, and patronage and conflict of interest, among others.

Stevens says the course looks at “the dark side of politics” but it also sheds light on how governments deal with scandals. “There’s lots of lessons to learn about ethical standards and the way governments try to keep politics and politicians honest, and the extent to which they succeed or fail,” he says.

He says the vast majority of politicians follow the rules, but scandals tend to arise when “there’s too much money floating around and too little control over it.”

Canadian examples he covers in the course include the Pacific Scandal scandal under John A. Macdonald and the sponsorship scandal under Jean Chrétien, both of which brought down their respective governments. Despite these and other examples, Canada ranks among the top 12 countries in the world for political honesty, he adds.

Politicians who behave badly lose the public’s trust, but Stevens wants students to remember that not all of them are corrupt. “Most people are very well-intentioned and do their jobs honourably and honestly and are good stewards of the public trust and public tax funds,” he says. “There are always exceptions to this, and the exceptions are quite often instructive.” – SUSAN BUBAK

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Depew figured a more diverse student group at U of G would help her learn more as she prepares to start making cheese on her farm. Guelph’s weeklong short course in cheese making technology also offers more hands-on learning.

Those ideas resonate with food science professor and longtime cheese making instructor Art Hill. Standing in the pilot plant in the Food Science Building where students in white lab coats and hairnets cluster around stainless steel vats containing the makings for cheddar, provolone and Colby cheeses, he says the course has “a good blend of theory and hands-on. The idea is to get your hands in the vat, and they love it.”

Next year will mark the 60th anniversary of Guelph’s cheese making technology course, the only one of its kind in Canada. The five-day session draws 20 to 25 people from Ontario and around the world; students work in various fields, including retail, production, regulatory affairs, quality assurance and academia.

They learn the basics of the craft, including how to make about 20 kinds of cheese. That’s a tiny fraction of the roughly 4,000 kinds of cheese made worldwide, says Hill, who has judged at international cheese competitions for about a decade. Whether it’s crumbly feta or Camembert so creamy it practically runs off the plate, he says, “Cheese makers never stop learning these little tips and tricks that give you different functionality.” – ANDREW VOWLES

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