An Engineering Design-Oriented First Year Biomedical Engineering Curriculum
- Conference
- Location
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Salt Lake City, Utah
- Publication Date
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June 23, 2018
- Start Date
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June 23, 2018
- End Date
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July 27, 2018
- Conference Session
- Tagged Division
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Biomedical Engineering
- Tagged Topic
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Diversity
- Page Count
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10
- DOI
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10.18260/1-2--29779
- Permanent URL
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https://strategy.asee.org/29779
- Download Count
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545
Paper Authors
Kay C. Dee Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology
Kay C. Dee received a B.S. degree in chemical engineering from Carnegie Mellon University, and M.Eng. and Ph.D. degrees in biomedical engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. After completing her graduate work, Kay C joined the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Tulane University in New Orleans, Louisiana. She later joined the faculty at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology. She served as the founding Director of the Rose-Hulman Center for the Practice and Scholarship of Education, and is currently the Associate Dean of Learning & Technology as well as a founding member of the team that annually delivers Rose-Hulman's 'Making Academic Change Happen' workshop.
Kay C has received a number of awards for teaching, research, and mentoring, including the Louisiana "Professor of the Year" award from the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, a CAREER award from the National Science Foundation, the Tulane University “Inspirational Undergraduate Professor” award; the Tulane University President’s Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching; the Graduate Alliance for Education in Louisiana Award for Excellence in Mentoring Minority Researchers; the honor to serve as a Teaching Fellow for the National Effective Teaching Institute; and more.
Patricia Brackin P.E. Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology
Patricia Brackin is a Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, where she teaches design throughout the curriculum. She is particularly interested in human-centered design. Her B.S. and M.S. are from the University of Tennessee in Nuclear Engineering and her Ph.D. is from Georgia Institute of Technology in Mechanical Engineering. Her industrial experience includes Oak Ridge National Laboratories, Chicago Bridge and Iron, and a sabbatical at Eli Lilly. She is a registered Professional Engineer in the State of Tennessee and a Fellow of ASME.
Anneliese Watt Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology
Anneliese Watt is a professor of English at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology. She teaches and researches technical and professional communication, rhetoric and composition, medicine in literature, and other humanities elective courses for engineering and science students. Her graduate work in rhetoric and literature was completed at Penn State, and her recent research often focuses on engineering and workplace communication as well as medical humanities. She is currently working in the Engineering Design-focused first-year Biomedical Engineering curriculum.
Alan Chiu Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology
Glen A. Livesay Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology
Glen Livesay is a Professor of Biology and Biomedical Engineering; he co-developed and co-teaches the biomedical engineering capstone design sequence at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology. Glen’s educational research interests include student learning styles, increasing student engagement with hands-on activities, and more recently, creativity & design. He has received an NSF CAREER award and served as a Fellow at the National Effective Teaching Institute.
Jay Patrick McCormack Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology
Jay McCormack is an associate professor in the mechanical engineering department at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology. Dr. McCormack received his PhD in mechanical engineering from Carnegie Mellon University in 2003. His areas of research interest include engineering education, computational design, and manufacturing.
Renee D. Rogge Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology
Renee Rogge is the Samuel F. Hulbert Chair of Biomedical Engineering and Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology. She has been teaching at Rose-Hulman since 2004, and her research interests lie in the areas of assessment of engineering design and orthopaedic biomechanics.
Richard A. House Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology
Richard A. House is Professor of English at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology. He received a B.A. from Illinois Wesleyan University and M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of California, Irvine. His interests include liberal education for engineers, engineering communication and pedagogy, sustainability, and Shakespeare. He is co-author (with Richard Layton, Jessica Livingston, and Sean Moseley) of The Engineering Communication Manual (2017, Oxford University Press).
Abstract
In this paper we will report on the development and deployment of a new, integrative, first-year biomedical engineering curriculum focused on studio-based learning of engineering design. Developed by an interdisciplinary team of faculty and staff, this curriculum is team-taught (meaning, multiple faculty are in the studio at all times) by biomedical engineers, mechanical engineers who specialize in design, a professor of English, a computer scientist, and a mathematician. The foundation of the curriculum is the engineering design studio, which meets four hours per day, four days per week. No homework is assigned from the design studio. The studio is complemented by a coordinated mathematics course which meets three times as week as lecture/active learning sessions and once for a three-hour laboratory each week. Over the academic year, the mathematics course covers topics traditionally taught as Calculus I, II, and III classes. The design studio has a different general theme for each academic quarter – for example, the Fall quarter theme is ‘Play for All,’ focusing on children’s play environments, toys, and games that are universally accessible. Within this theme, students complete multiple design projects through the prototyping phase (e.g., redesigning the ‘popcorn popper’ walking toy for children with a range of physical abilities and sensitivities), accompanied by a range of documentation (e.g., empathy maps; engineering drawings; written, poster, and oral presentations). This paper will map the instructional topics covered in the new curriculum to typical first and second year biomedical engineering curricula, and will report results of qualitative research on student and faculty/staff reactions to the new curriculum as the first year progresses. This paper will also report initial quantitative data on the academic hardiness of the biomedical engineering students: Were these students measurably more ‘academically hardy’ than other incoming engineering students? Did the repeated exposure to open-ended problem-solving situations measurably increase these biomedical engineering students’ academic hardiness? Finally, we will present a comparison of the academic performance of students who participated in this new curriculum with students who did not.
Dee, K. C., & Brackin, P., & Watt, A., & Chiu, A., & Livesay, G. A., & McCormack, J. P., & Rogge, R. D., & House, R. A. (2018, June), An Engineering Design-Oriented First Year Biomedical Engineering Curriculum Paper presented at 2018 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition , Salt Lake City, Utah. 10.18260/1-2--29779
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