EXPERIMENTAL EDUCATION IN FOOD CHEMISTRY

Science was born in laboratories and it is in these where the more important technological advances are obtained, reason why experimental education is a fundamental part in the formation of the withdrawn ones of technical degrees.

This work is the result of the experiences of the professors who have teached the subject Analysis of Foods, the degree in Food Chemistry and served as the basis for the program of the Food Laboratory I, of the Curriculum recently modified.

In the traditional activities of the teaching laboratories, the determination of the components of a food was made using the reported method in Literature, in spite of existing an ample range of alternating methods and without the student applied his criterion to select most suitable for a sample in individual. Even, different samples for the determination from each component were used, to assure that the results were adapted, without the integration of the results was obtained.

This work is a reconstruction of the experimental activities for the food area. In the laboratory course one works within the frame of a Program of the Reformation of the Experimental Education that it establishes that problems consider to the student that it has to solve by means of the experimentation and through the obtaining of reliable and reproducibles results. It conserves the strengths of the experimental education of the Faculty of Chemistry of the UNAM and proposes modifications to correct its weaknesses. It raises changes that will result in one better formation of the students enrolled in Food Chemistry.

Reviewing and redefining practical education allow fundamentally to retake the basic objectives of this activity, the acquisition of practical abilities indispensable in the professional exercise by means of the accomplishment of experiments oriented to practical objectives near the daily reality of the work in the laboratory. When complementing suitably the theoretical activities with the experimental ones, practical education does not become enriching and versatile much more, without letting be based on theoretical concepts, but without supeditar themselves either to the demonstration of the theory, but with a direction to the work by specific objectives. In order to make the subject to the students attractive, at the beginning a global problem appeared, in which with base in the composition of a sample provided from the beginning of the sessions, the students could give off implications that go from the evaluation of the quality of the product, to the development of foods and the generation of nutrimental information (Nielsen, 2004)

In order to determine each component individual protocols were considered using diverse methodologies, in order that the students observed the advantages and limitations of each one of them and finally decided as it was the suitable method but for the sample in study. Next one of the created problems and the obtained results appears.

Applying its knowledge of reactivity and the food systems, one faces the students a problem in which they will have to select the suitable procedure to carry out the analysis of the macrocomponents of a given food. The results obtained by the professors in a research laboratory and those of the students in the course of events appear, with very good correlation.