Freshman Biomedical Engineering Design Projects: What Can Be Done?

During the 2000 ASEE meeting the question arose in the Biomedical Engineering division about the paucity of information on design projects for freshman introductory design courses (cornerstone courses.) This paper will present an overview of what can be gleaned from the literature on such projects. Introduction: Design challenges in a freshman level introductory course can serve to introduce a student to the design process early in their career. A successful application of what skills an early engineering student has can lead to increased retention and interest on the part of the students. Finding the right personnel to man such a course, and finding the right design challenges, is necessary for a good experience. This paper will address the challenge of finding good design problems for use in Biomedical Engineering projects in a freshman course. Methods: Several of the methods to generate these projects are enumerated below: 1. Go beyond your teaching team: The engineering faculty at Vanderbilt University were surveyed by the faculty in charge of the freshman introductory engineering course for design projects. This course covers the use of Excel, MATLAB, VRML programming, and very basic web page design, and concludes with a project and a project fair. The end result was a listing of design projects that could be used for all majors in the course, a listing of the BME specific design projects may be found in Appendix 1. Eight faculty from four departments proposed projects, all of which were attempted by student groups. A listing of the project titles and the basic skill required may be seen in table 1. It is worth noting that the skill level assumed in every case was that of the entering or mid semester freshman level.