2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

This Complete Evidence Based Practice paper describes how hands-on experiential learning can be utilized in an introductory engineering course to teach complex topics and introduce practices that help students feel a sense of belonging to the field. Bioengineering is a multidisciplinary field of students and researchers with diverse backgrounds, academic experiences, and skills. Because the field encompasses so many concepts, techniques, and applications from other engineering disciplines as well as biology, students can feel underqualified in the depth and breadth of topics, or ‘othered’ compared to their peers. This is often observed especially in first-year students or those transferring from other fields.

Introduction to Bioengineering (BIOE XXX) is a 1 credit hour course offered to non-bioengineering majors at a large public university. It has an enrollment of ~75 students, approximately 50% first year students and 50% engineers, with the vast majority pursuing a STEM-related degree, a BIOE minor, or transferring into the undergraduate program. Students in this course wish to learn more about the field yet come from a variety of backgrounds, resulting in differing levels of knowledge and academic experience.

As survey-style courses take a broad approach and often offer fewer credit hours, it can be difficult to teach technical concepts with their confines, especially to students who lack necessary prerequisites. Moreover, in many engineering classroom settings, technical concepts are taught in a didactic, unidirectional manner. Though students may practice applying the material in homework problems and exams, there is a general lack of hands-on experiences outside of labs, though the skills that engineering students may gain from such experiential activities can solidify concepts, connect to real-world situations, and aid in future environments such as design, graduate school, and industry.

Transport and fluid dynamics are chief considerations in bioengineering. Porous materials (bone, tissue scaffolds, etc.) can transfer molecules, drugs, and other therapeutics. Importantly, fluid flow underlies many physiological systems, including the circulatory and lymphatic systems, as well as engineered devices such as bioreactors. These overarching concepts lend themselves to hands-on activities but can be difficult to implement on a smaller scale in a lecture classroom setting (as opposed to a large laboratory or outside environment, where most examples in this field take place) to first-year or transfer students without prior knowledge of the topic.

One topic of interest is the transport of mass through a porous medium, modeled by Darcy’s Law. We designed a low-cost protocol in which students in BIOE XXX tested the properties of soils that emulated other permeable materials relevant to bioengineering. First, student teams were diversified by academic major, gender, and skill levels in as data collection, analysis, and scientific writing, in order to build on each other’s strengths. During the experiment, students quantified the flow dynamics of various soil types with different porosities and drainage properties, then planted seeds to compare plant growth, moisture levels, and soil pH over time. To conclude, students discussed the connection between their measurement techniques and engineering design in the context of biomedical systems, and related the project to KEEN’s 3Cs of curiosity, connections, and creating value.

Pre- and post-activity surveys assessed the activities’ effectiveness in introducing the topics. Additionally, validated instruments (including “Measure of Engineering Identity” – Goodwin et al, 2016; “Pre-Semester Concerns in First-Year Engineering Students” – Chin et al, 2024; “Persistence Research in Science & Engineering" survey) were used to measure the impact on students’ sense of belonging and identity in bioengineering. Finally, self- and team-based evaluations allowed for the examination of group diversity on the learning process.

This interactive activity allowed students a hands-on experience to learn about a topics that is traditionally difficult to demonstrate in the classroom. The concept could be broadly translated across other technical disciplines to complement traditional lectures (commonly experienced by first-year or transfer students) with experiences that connect their understanding of complex engineering topics to areas with familiar objects or real-life relevance.