Special Interest Section of a Core Mechanical Engineering Course – Biomaterial Emphasis of an Introduction to Materials Course

The University of Dayton (UD) is part of the Kern Entrepreneurship Education Network (KEEN) which aims to instill the entrepreneurial mindset in engineering students through a collaboration among 24 colleges and universities across the US. To facilitate this, KEEN offers a variety of resources to individual engineering faculty as well as its network institutions. One such program offered by the University of Dayton is the KEEN Faculty Fellows Program. The objective of this program is to help engineering faculty understand innovative teaching strategies such as active and collaborative learning (ACL), project/problem based learning (PBL) and entrepreneurially minded learning (EML) and then use this information to modify a course or to create a new course. This paper will describe the modification of a core mechanical engineering course, Introduction to Materials, to have a Biomaterial focus, to employ ACL/PBL techniques and to include project based learning modules aimed at fostering the entrepreneurial mindset in the students. Because this is a core mechanical engineering course, the primary learning objectives for the Introduction to Materials course had to be met through this modified course offering. The efficacy of this modified course in comparison to the traditional Introduction to Materials course was assessed by comparing the final exam scores with those of a control group. Additionally, the students’ perception of their learning was captured through student feedback forms facilitated at the conclusion of each of the projects as well as at the conclusion of the semester. Results from the assessments suggest that the modules did not negatively affect the overall learning of the students as measured by their performance on a common, cumulative final exam. Students generally liked the opportunity to apply their knowledge to real world problems that were thematically centered on the biomedical industry and to be able to work in teams.