Ice cream, chocolate and Spartan spirit sound more like football game fun than an engineering project.

But biosystems engineering seniors Matthew Kloes, Kim Lewis, Marc Sawyers and Shelley Vecchio have found a way to incorporate flavor and fun into their senior design project, while still focusing on developing skills necessary for future careers.

The four students are working to produce chocolate-covered ice cream bars formed into a Spartan block "S" shape.

"It's a pretty interesting project," Kloes said. "So far, it's actually been pretty fun."

The group's project is to design a process for the MSU Dairy Processing Plant to produce the ice cream bars. The process will utilize the dairy's existing ice cream-making machinery, but would call for additional machines that the plant does not already have to create the bars in mass quantities.

The dairy plant can still create the bars, but it does not have a system such as the one the students are creating, and the treats would take longer to make. The students will create an "S"-shaped die and a wire cutter that the dairy plant could use to shape the bars.

"We get to play with food and make ice cream," Vecchio said. "What other majors can do that?"

On Wednesday, the group worked amid the sticky floors, steaming vats and whirring machines in the dairy plant to experiment with the ice cream. They spent more than an hour watching ice cream fall from a machine onto a tray while measuring its temperature and diameter.

The students have been working since October, beginning by brainstorming exactly what kind of product they wanted to make.

The original idea the students received was from the dairy — to produce a traditional ice cream bar out of one flavor of ice cream, with an "S" made of a different flavor.

"We thought it would be more appealing if we actually made an 'S' (shape) out of the ice cream and then covered it with chocolate," Vecchio said.

After deciding to make ice cream bars, the students researched similar products on the market — any other ice cream bars covered in chocolate. To get a rough idea of how their product should compare, they performed tests to determine the average serving size of the existing bars, the ratio of ice cream to chocolate in each bar and the thickness of the chocolate, Vecchio said.

"It's a great idea," said James Steffe, a biosystems and agricultural engineering professor who has been the group's main adviser. "This one applies to food, so it's a good project for sure."

MSU dairy plant manager John Engstrom agreed.

"Anytime you play with ice cream, it's good," he said. "If it's a block 'S,' you can't go wrong."

After they determine the ideal qualities of the ice cream that will be used, the group will then work with the chocolate to see what temperature will work best, how quickly it will harden and how it will adhere to the ice cream.

The group hopes to eventually market its Spartan ice cream bars to the Kellogg Center and residence halls. So far, they've made five or six test bars, Vecchio said, adding that their goal is to mass produce 500-1,000 at a time.

"If they can produce a good block 'S,' I think there's enough Spartans out there that would like them," Engstrom said.

Engstrom said the project could prove challenging.

"What they're trying to do is really hard," he said. "It sounds simple, but it's not. I know they can succeed. They just have to work at it."

So far, there haven't been too many problems, Kloes said.

"It's a lot of work, though," Sawyers said. "You take it for granted when you buy a product off the shelf."