2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Bridging Extracurricular Skill Needs in Bioengineering Capstone Design with Just-in-Time Workshops

Presented at Biomedical Engineering Division (BED) Technical Session 2

Bioengineering senior design courses play a pivotal role in preparing students for real-world challenges by engaging them in interdisciplinary design projects. The rapid evolution of technology combined with students' diverse backgrounds often result in gaps in their foundational knowledge and skill sets. These gaps in knowledge and practical prototyping experience create challenges for students when engaging with the variety of design projects that are proposed. This paper presents an effort to address these skill gaps through the implementation of hands-on workshop modules within a bioengineering senior design course. These workshops - which occur “Just-in-Time” as students enter the prototyping phase - are strategically designed to align with requirements of the ongoing, externally sponsored senior design projects. Workshops include computer aided design (CAD), microcontroller programming, elastomer molding and casting, and programming in Python, and students were required to attend at least one of their choice. Workshop topics were selected after reviewing gaps in core curriculum and considering which skills would be most applicable to rapid prototyping. We mapped workshop attendance to team projects to understand student motivation for attendance, and collected student feedback after each workshop. Feedback was collected on the perceived utility of the workshops to capstone projects as well as the perceived value of the workshop to students’ future careers. We also evaluated evidence of the prototyping techniques present in final course projects to understand how the skills gained in workshops are used or expanded upon during the semester. Delivering these workshops throughout the course allows students to immediately use and apply these skills on their own design projects, which offers a unique advantage to the Just-in-Time modality. Results reveal the potential of Just-in-Time workshops to enhance experiential learning, reduce barriers to prototyping, and empower students to overcome obstacles encountered during the design process.

Authors

Eliot Bethke University of Illinois at Urbana - Champaign [biography]

Eliot Bethke is a Ph.D student in Bioengineering at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). He holds a B.S. in bioengineering also from UIUC. Prior to entering graduate school, Eliot spent 8 years working in small businesses ranging in focus from healthcare to medical education to battery technology. In 2018, he was hired as an instructor at the Carle Illinois College of Medicine to assist in constructing curricular components to teach medical students about key medical and engineering technologies. This experience awakened a love of instructing and curricular design, which guides his current research studying the impact of technologies and curricular design on students and medical professionals.
Dr. Ali Ansari http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2957-8634 University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign [biography]

Ali Ansari is a Teaching Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He holds a Masters and Ph.D in Bioengineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and graduated from Southern Methodist University with a degree in Electrical Engineering. Ali has been teaching for the past two years at Bucknell University in both the Biomedical Engineering and Electrical and Computer Engineering and been focusing on student focused pedagogy centered around Game-based learning techniques.
Dr. Jennifer R Amos http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9437-8201 University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign [biography]

Dr Amos joined the Bioengineering Department at the University of Illinois in 2009 and is currently a Teaching Professor in Bioengineering.
Dr. Joe Bradley University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign [biography]

Joe Bradley is a Clinical Assistant Professor in Bioengineering in the Grainger College of Engineering, a Health Innovation Professor and the Director of Engineering Education and Entrepreneurship in the Carle Illinois College of Medicine. His research focuses primarily on engineering design/Bio Design collaboration in transdisciplinary teams. He has used and developed tools to study the alignment of products and services with organizational processes as an organization seeks to address needs and bring new products and services to the market.
Dr. Ruth Ochia P.E. http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5924-7011 Temple University [biography]

Dr. Ruth S. Ochia is a Professor of Instruction with the Bioengineering Department, Temple University, Philadelphia, Pa. Her past research interests have included Biomechanics, primarily focusing on spine-related injuries and degeneration. Currently, her research interest are in engineering education specifically with design thinking process and student motivation.
Dr. Holly M Golecki http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3691-0420 University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign [biography]

Dr. Holly Golecki (she/her) is a Teaching Assistant Professor in Bioengineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She holds an appointment at the Carle-Illinois College of Medicine in the Department of Biomedical and Translational Sciences. Holly studies biomaterials and soft robotics and their applications in the university classroom, in undergraduate research and in engaging K12 students in STEM. Holly received her BS/MS in Materials Science and Engineering from Drexel University and her PhD in Engineering Sciences from Harvard University.

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