Biomedical Engineering (BME) students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison participate in team-based design throughout the curriculum for six sequential semesters. Student teams work on hands-on, client-based, real-world biomedical design problems solicited from healthcare professionals, local industry, community members, and life sciences and clinical faculty. Through the design process, the students learn a variety of professional skills on topics including engineering notebooks, written and oral reports, engineering ethics, intellectual property, FDA approval, and animal/human subjects testing. The students also have the opportunity to learn as they are needed, various technical skills including computer-aided design, finite element analysis, machining/fabrication, electronics and electrical measurement and design, LabVIEW, MATLAB and microcontroller programming, mechanical testing, and basic laboratory techniques related to biomaterials and tissue engineering.
As our student population has grown, we have had an increasing challenge to informally and effectively teach our students these cutting-edge skills that will enable them to be better engineers. In addition, our BME Student Advisory Committee (BSAC) has expressed interest in having more formal, directed training in a guided fashion early in the curriculum. In order to effectively teach these important professional, technical, and life-long skills, we developed a new sophomore-level lecture/laboratory course, BME 201, “Biomedical Engineering Fundamentals and Design.” We offered it for the first time in Spring 2012, and it has been taught twice so far.
The weekly lecture focuses directly on professional skills, and introduces students to the department’s five areas of study (bioinstrumentation, biomedical imaging, biomechanics, biomaterials/cellular/tissue engineering, and healthcare systems) through lectures by faculty in those areas. These lectures were recorded during the first offering so that the videos can be viewed outside of class, and the lecture time can be repurposed for a more blended learning experience in future offerings thus creating weekly modules.
The weekly laboratory period focuses on directly training the students in technical skills, such as those listed above that were previously offered on an ad hoc basis, in order train students to solve a multidisciplinary guided design project using these skills in teams. The laboratories were designed and are taught in conjunction with BME faculty instructors by undergraduate BME student assistants (SAs), allowing them to gain valuable teaching experience while giving our sophomore students an opportunity to learn from and interact with their peers.
The guided design project requires the student teams to incorporate the knowledge and hands-on skills they learn during the semester to design and fabricate a bioreactor to measure the mechanical properties of soft biomaterials that they synthesize in our tissue engineering teaching lab.
Throughout the project, the students maintain design notebooks, prepare product design specifications, create and present oral presentations, and communicate their design and results by preparing a technical report. As this is the only course where all sophomore BME students are together, we have had the unique opportunity to teach them in an open forum led by their upperclassmen peers. Through P ge 24331.2 this multidisciplinary, blended, hands-on approach, early in the curriculum, students have obtained the skills they need to be successful in their future projects, to make informed decisions about their BME area of study and careers, and to enable them to become better engineers.
