Purpose: Engineering students gain confidence and competency through continual practice of key skills. The social cognitive theory construct of self-efficacy provides a useful measure to assess students' beliefs in their ability to succeed or perform tasks. Research focused on the impacts of curricular engineering design experiences on student…

In design-oriented biomedical engineering courses, some instructors teach need-driven methods for health technology innovation that use a "need statement" to reflect a student team's hypothesis about the most fruitful direction for their project. While need statements are of the utmost importance to the projects, we were not aware of any…

We have implemented a jigsaw framework in our biomedical engineering capstone design course by overlaying strategic consideration groups across our design teams. Collaboration in design courses is usually focused within a design team with some peer feedback, but opportunities to work across teams are often limited. The purpose of this teaching tip…

Human bodies vary widely: height, weight, blood volume, handedness, strength, and variations from disabilities, trauma, genetics, etc. Engineers must be trained to include human variance when designing human-interactive systems. Typically, this is not incorporated into mathematical and modeling focused courses. In the spring of 2019, one of three…

As students gain more experience with design concepts, they should progress from novice to expert design thinkers. The purpose of this research was to identify the constructs of growth in design thinking (DT) over short- (one weekend) and long-term (10 weeks) design challenges. A DT mindset questionnaire was completed by students in a third-year…

Biomedical engineering capstone design courses provide a salient opportunity to discuss ethical considerations in engineering. As technology and society develop and change, new challenges constantly arise related to how society and technology inform each other. In this space, ethical training for engineering students is critically important for…

The design of biological systems is a multidisciplinary activity in which biomedical engineers collaborate to build novel biological systems that address society's needs. One of the most relevant skills for designing biological systems is engineering systems thinking (EST). Among the EST elements, the EST cognitive competencies are comparatively…

The unique characteristics of the training needed for today's biomedical engineers can represent a challenge in curriculum design. Practical experiential learning for biomedical engineering undergraduates is important to prevent under-developed professional skills. In this teaching tips article, we provide an example of how to incorporate…

With a motivation to immerse students in engineering design, graphics communication, and computer aided design (CAD) skills early-on in the biomedical engineering curriculum, we launched a new 2-unit laboratory course on "Graphics Design in BME" in the Spring 2020 quarter for UC Davis sophomores. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the course…

During the spring of 2020, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, it was necessary to rapidly translate a new human-centered design studio course for first-year biomedical engineering students from a face-to-face delivery mode to a remote delivery mode. In addition to disrupting plans for hands-on design prototyping experiences, stay-at-home orders…

The main purpose of this paper is to share the Mentoring for INnovative Design Solutions (MINDS) Scholars Program developed by Alpha Eta Mu Beta, the International Biomedical Engineering Honor Society. The program's goals are to (1) introduce biomedical engineering students to an open-ended design experience as part of interuniversity teams with…

Mental health challenges have been rising across college campuses. To destigmatize wellness practices and promote student mental health, we present a novel technical project in an introductory bioengineering course that explores stress management techniques through physiology, biosensors, and design. We hypothesize that if students measure…

Our first year biomedical engineering course exposes students to multiple engineering and design techniques within an overarching theme of understanding health inequity. Currently, the semester-long curriculum excludes computational methods such as Python programming and Machine Learning, which are usually not introduced until more advanced BME…

Amidst the dual challenges of an eight-month university closure from nationwide public university strikes in Nigeria and the lingering impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, we needed to innovate the delivery of BME graduate curriculum to ensure graduate students continued to progress in their studies. To ensure BME graduate students were engaging in…

BME HealthReach is an educational outreach program where undergraduate BME students participate in an out-of-class design thinking course to create and teach interactive STEM activities to K-12 students, where children with chronic illnesses are the primary clients. We detail research that seeks to answer the following: (1) what impact does this…