A Survey of Biomedical Design Projects to Inform Skill Development in a New Undergraduate Biomedical Engineering Curriculum

Hands-on design projects are widely used in engineering curricula to improve hardware/software skills, develop design mindsets, and tie real-world problems to engineering curricula with an eye toward increased student engagement and retention. In Fall 2018, Kansas State University (KSU) accepted its first cadre of incoming freshmen into a new Biomedical Engineering (BME) degree program. In an effort to increase the effectiveness of the program’s design courses, which will be offered annually to students of various ages beginning in Fall 2020, the authors performed a search of recent engineering education literature related to the inclusion of design projects in undergraduate BME curricula, focusing on (a) projects that could be reasonably incorporated into courses that support undergraduate students with little-to-no design experience, (b) efforts that map to the emphasis areas for this new BME program, (c) student-learning assessment techniques that have proved useful in these hands-on contexts, and (d) projects that would make interesting recruiting examples for high school students considering such a program. The overall goal of this work is to allow lessons learned from these earlier efforts to inform projects offered as part of this new BME curriculum. This paper presents (1) an overview of this new curriculum, (2) the skillsets that this new BME program intentionally addresses and the courses that will support that skillset development, (3) BME project-based efforts described in the literature that relate thematically to the emphasis areas in this curriculum, (4) assessment methods that have appeared useful when applied to such projects, and (5) suitable categories of starter projects for this new curriculum, including those that can be prototyped prior to the Fall 2020/2021 onset of the initial junior/senior-level design sequences.