2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

In many states it has become commonplace for K-12 students to associate chemical engineering solely with the petrochemical industry. Oftentimes this belief, coupled with the fact that many of these students are unaware of what a chemical engineer does, leads to promising students abandoning the pursuit of a degree in a STEM-related field. One area in which many high school students show interest, but know little about, is bioengineering and/or biochemical engineering. This is also confounded by the fact that most high school teachers are not engineers and struggle with teaching students about complex engineering concepts or the engineering design process. To address this, we developed and implemented an engineering design challenge for high schoolers to 1) enhance student awareness of engineering applications and careers with emphasis on biological systems, 2) train students on the engineering design process, 3) challenge students to solve a current problem related to human health, 4) instruct students on how to collect and analyze data, and 5) give students experience in presenting their findings. The design challenge itself had teams of 3-4 high school students design, build, and test a system capable of trapping and isolating circulating tumor cells (CTCs) – one of the grand challenges in cancer research. The ‘cells’ (both health and cancerous cells in addition to red blood cells) were modeled by rice, macaroni noodles, and penne noodles in a heterogeneous mixture and the students were able to build their system them using a variety of household items such as paper plates, bowls, cups, duct tape, toothpicks, scissors, Xacto knives, straws, string, etc. to facilitate a size-based separation. Each item had a cost associated with it and the students were required to keep track of how much they spent on their system in addition to collecting separation data using established metrics like separation efficiency, purity, and throughput time. At the end of the module, the teams presented their findings to their peers and a panel of judges using a rubric based on one used for regional science fair competitions. The Bioengineering 101 module has been performed four times from 2019-2023 at the same high school; however, the design and implementation of the module significantly evolved due to student feedback, faculty observations, and the COVID-19 pandemic. The evolution of how the module was implemented included changes in the age of the students (first year vs. third year students), the duration of the modules (two weeks vs. four weeks), and how the chemical engineering faculty member was able to directly engage with the students (in-person, virtually, or asynchronously). Assessment of the program through pre- and post-surveys found that participation resulted in (i) a greater understanding of the engineering design process, (ii) higher confidence in their ability to be engineers, (iii) greater comfort in their ability to collect and present data, and (iv) a better understanding of the interdisciplinary topics that engineers can work on. While the focus of the application was on biological applications of chemical engineering, the design of the module has the potential to be implemented with other emphasis areas using a similar size-based separation approach.