Work in Progress: Biomedical Prototype Design in Collaborative Teams to Increase Students' Comprehension and Engagement

摘要

The goal of engineering programs is to graduate students who have technical, interpersonal, and conceptual competence. When our department was awarded funding to achieve that goal, we incorporated a semester-long prototype design project into our biomedical engineering course. Integration of hands-on activities into course curricula increases students' investment in learning, understanding of concepts, and gives them an opportunity to develop technical skills. Design challenges that are related to real-world issues can help students understand course relevance and their role in solving those issues. Collaborative, active learning tends to improve comprehension when compared to traditional lecture methods. Based on these educational principles, we restructured a primarily lecture-based biomedical engineering course to include team building activities, hands-on design challenges, and a prototype design project.