2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Many engineering core curriculum feature design education via senior design capstones, or “bookend” design experiences at the beginning and end of the engineering curriculum. This not only leaves design experiences in the critical middle years of engineering education largely unaddressed, but also misses out on the opportunity for development of critical engineering skills. We aim to tackle this gap in knowledge and practical experiences through a strategic course redesign to enhance metacognitive skills, employ empathetic engineering, and develop expert-like biomedical engineering design epistemologies. At the foundation of this work is a backwards design pedagogical approach to course curriculum development in which learning outcomes are the foundation and guide all class activities and content. BME 2081 is a 1-credit, third-year course of approximately 55 students which heavily features teamwork and reflective reasoning to better prepare students for senior design and the biomedical engineering workforce. Based on the theories of situated and experiential learning, this new course structure focuses on design scenarios that emulate the “real-world”, while providing sufficient scaffolding to coach students through the reflective process, allowing for abstract conceptualization. This work in progress paper presents the steps of the decision making process throughout the course redesign, as well as details of the course and results from the ideation processes, pilot testing with students over the summer, and the first iteration of the course in Fall 2024. The redesigned biomedical engineering course includes four modules that aim to introduce students to all steps of the biomedical design process through hands-on learning experiences. We present various course activities including rapid prototyping, reverse engineering (device dissection), data validation on real-world datasets, as well as regulatory standards and ethics case studies through role playing scenarios. For the purpose of this paper, we will be discussing initial results from a course artifact in Module 3. The goal of this work is to create a course which engages students in the collaborative design process while fostering reflective reasoning and empathy within biomedical engineering contexts.