Paper ID #9730

Work in Progress: International BME Capstone and Summer Design Expe-rience

Prof. Mark A. Ruegsegger, The Ohio State University

Mark Ruegsegger is currently an Associate Professor of Practice in the Department of Biomedical Engi-neering at Ohio State University. He has a curricular focus on the Senior Design capstone course, whichincludes multi-disciplinary teams of BME, Mechanical Engineering, Occupational & Physical Therapy,and other Medical and Engineering disciplines. Each project team builds a device that provides assis-tance to those with disabilities, or projects with other clinical or industrial aspects. Mark received hisProfessional Engineering (PE) license in 2009 in the Metals and Materials specialty.

c©American Society for Engineering Education, 2014

Work in Progress: International BME Capstone and

Summer Design Experience

Introduction

Education that includes international experiences has long been seen as an important way to give

students a unique perspective and skill set for their future career endeavors. Seldom, however,

do these experiences include rigorous engineering education. This can be due to constraints of a

typical engineering curriculum, the lack of equivalent courses offered internationally, or the

language barrier. In this study we report the ongoing efforts to implement a unique, international

capstone course, involving significant interactions between the students of both programs.

Initial discussions started when a BME faculty member at Nanjing University, China (NJU) and

a BME faculty member (author) from The Ohio State University (OSU) shared ideas on capstone

projects. Discussions turned into potential shared activities between the Departments, including

a dual capstone. Initially, we considered having both NJU and OSU student teams make the

same device simultaneously in the Senior Capstone course at their own institution. The

interaction would come by sharing ideas, best practices, reports, and strategies throughout the

year via teleconferencing and email. Although simple in some ways, it also included a lot of

challenges. Further discussion refined the early ideas to focus on a pre-capstone experience for

Junior students, where NJU and OSU students could work on teams and gain extra design and

team skills, with an international perspective, before the senior capstone course. From this, the

current plan is detailed here of an annual Summer Design Experiences (SDE) at both institutions,

and an internationally co-mentored senior design project in alternate years at NJU.

Program Structure

The overall program structure is presented in Table 1, showing the timeline for events in a two-

year cycle. The Summer Design Experience has been developed to be a 2-3 week design

experience for a small group of students (10-15) traveling internationally to the other institution.

Being fully in English at both institutions, language will not be a barrier, and all student teams

will be a mixture of students from both universities. The summer design experience will center

on hands-on training in the design of medical devices, starting with interviewing the clinical

mentor, families and individuals to understand the underlying medical problem. The teams will

then propose a design for the device, and finally build and test the device. Other aspects of the

SDE include learning machining techniques and biological lab skills; seminars on biomedical

engineering topics from the local program’s faculty and invited speakers; cultural activities; lab,

hospital and industry tours; and other learning experiences. We intend to have the experiences

alternate locations annually, with the first design experience to take place at OSU in Summer

2014.

When the Summer Design Experience is hosted at NJU, the OSU partner will serve as a project

engineering co-mentor for a team design project at NJU. The first co-mentored capstone project

will take place at NJU in the Spring 2015 term, during the SDE and then continuing after the

SDE has finished and the OSU students have returned home. The team of NJU seniors will

initially be mentored by the NJU faculty, learning the design process and defining the problem to

be solved. A clinical mentor from a local hospital will also participate as a consultant for all

medical questions pertaining to the problem. The OSU faculty will serve as a co-mentor for the

second half of the project, focusing on the building and testing of the device.

Table 1: Two-year cycle for international capstone collaboration

YEAR 1 YEAR 2

Fall Spring Summer Fall Spring Summer

OSU

students

Jr year

courses

at OSU

Jr year

courses at

OSU;

Apply to

SDE

Summer

Design

Experience

at OSU

Capstone

Design course

at OSU;

NEW Jr group

applies for

SDE

Capstone

Design course

at OSU

Summer

Design

Experience at

NJU

NJU

students

Jr year

courses

at NJU;

Apply to

SDE

Jr year

courses at

NJU;

Summer

Design

Experience

at OSU

Sr year

courses at

NJU;

Capstone

Design course

at NJU;

NEW Jr group

applies for

SDE

Summer

Design

Experience at

NJU

OSU

Faculty

Sr

Capstone

course at

OSU

Sr Capstone

course –

OSU;

Prepare for

SDE at OSU

Summer

Design

Experience

at OSU

Sr Capstone

course at

OSU;

Analyze data

from SDE

Sr Capstone

course at

OSU;

Prepare for

SDE

at NJU

Summer

Design

Experience

at NJU;

Co-mentored

project at NJU

NJU

Faculty

Teach

BME

courses

at NJU

Teach BME

courses at

NJU;

Prepare for

SDE at OSU

Summer

Design

Experience

at OSU

Teach BME

courses at

NJU;

Analyze data

from SDE

Teach BME

courses at

NJU;

Prepare for

SDE

at NJU

Summer

Design

Experience

at NJU;

Co-mentored

project at NJU

For the duration of the SDE, each day will be broken down into morning and afternoon sessions.

The morning session will include the machining and lab skills training, biomedical engineering

seminars, and meetings with clinical mentors to define the problem and ask daily questions about

the design. The afternoon sessions will be dedicated to team design work, building, modeling,

and testing. The projects will be a combination of new ideas, that have been previously vetted to

be ready for the design phase, and partially finished projects from the previous year’s Capstone

course. This will give teams the opportunity to see projects at various stages of completion, and

allow them to focus on various aspects of the design process. At the end of the SDE, teams will

have an opportunity to report on the process and outcome of their device design and activities.

Program Assessment

The goal of this collaboration is to build a strong partnership where students can obtain unique

team and individual skills, and be prepared for a biomedical engineering career in a more

globalized market and economy. We will examine these aspects with summative and formative

assessments. We have partnered with OSU’s Center for the Advancement of Teaching to

develop targeted surveys, new and modified from previously described design rubrics1-8

. The

assessment tools will be used to compare learning outcomes of OSU students and NJU students

that completed the SDE while on the same team. We also plan to implement surveys for students

that participate in the summer design experience with and without an international cohort.

Finally we will examine student outcome differences in the capstone course between the students

that did and did not have the extra SDE training. We will look for differences in their

experiences, team dynamics and learning outcomes in the engineering design activities to

quantify the effects of the international design experience.

Program Logistics and Goals

The success of this collaboration starts with a unique “Gateway” that OSU has developed within

China that promotes the accelerated development of collaborations with universities, programs

and faculty. Offices are established in China (within 1 hr of NJU), to help ensure the success of

our program once we arrive. This particular partnership also draws from the backing of both

Departments and higher administrative levels, particularly from NJU, which, for the inaugural

summer design experience at OSU in Summer 2014, is currently pledging significant funding to

support the trip for the NJU students.

There are significant opportunities for career development from this collaboration. As the

primary instructor of the Senior Design capstone course, I am the main resource for OSU

students for learning about industry models for design, manufacturing, business models, cost

assessment, medical device regulation, ethics, and global aspects of engineering. Developing this

collaboration would greatly enhance my ability to teach my students, as I would have meaningful

experiences with international engineering partners and global medical companies that I can use

in my classroom discussions. While at NJU, I will have the opportunity to speak at several

seminars within NJU and at local hospitals and medical facilities. I will also plan to meet with

industries, such as GE China. All of these presentations will promote the collaboration between

our institutions. Finally, I will also have the opportunity to disseminate what I have learned with

the broader engineering community in national publications, such as the Journal of Engineering

Education, and conferences, such as ASEE and BMES.

The summer design experience is not a registered course for credit at this time, but may be

expanded to include course credit in the future. Students selected for the summer design

experience will travel under a short-term visa, appropriate for the length and mission of the trip.

Students will be housed in standard summer campus housing, and transportation and meals are

included in the overall package. Current sources of funding include the NJU College

administration’s commitment to fund the NJU students’ inaugural trip to OSU. University travel

grants, administrative assistance and external travel grants (such as Burroughs Wellcome Fund)

are all being considered for future trips to minimize the personal cost to the students.

The significance of this collaboration is far-reaching, for the students, institutions, and the

engineering community at large. The students receive the direct benefit of the international

exposure within the engineering discipline, including immersion in a medical problem;

designing, building and testing with a multi-national team; and learning valuable engineering and

professional skills throughout the experience. The institutions can use the SDE as a springboard

for larger collaborations of research and instruction. For example, NSF has a specific

partnership with the “NSF-counterpart” in China for research grants between investigators in

both countries. Finally, all engineering programs will benefit from the dissemination of the

results and analysis from the assessments. Other programs can verify the difference in skills and

learning outcomes of students who did and did not participate in an international SDE. This is a

very exciting collaboration with many positive aspects to explore and share.

Bibliography 1. Laguette, Stephen W. Development of a Capstone Design Program for Undergraduate Mechanical Engineering.

Proceedings of the 2007 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition.

2. Dieter, George E. and Linda C. Schmidt. Engineering Design. Fourth Edition. McGraw-Hill.

3. Davis, Denny and S. Beyerlein, P. Thompson, K. Gentili, L. McKenzie. How Universal are Capstone Design

Course Outcomes? Proceedings of the 2003 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition.

4. Beyerlein, Steven and D. Davis, M. Trevisan, P. Thompson, O. Harrison. Assessment Framework for

Capstone Design Courses. Proceedings of the 2006 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition.

5. McCormack, Jay and D. Davis, S. Beyerlein, H. Davis, M. Trevisan, S. Howe, M. Khan, P. Brackin, P Thompson.

Classroom Learning Activities to Support Capstone Project Assessment Instruments. Proceedings of the 2011

ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition.

6. Estell, John K. and J. Hurtig. Using Rubrics for the Assessment of Senior Design Projects. Proceedings of the

2006 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition.

7. Brackin, Patricia and J.D. Gibson. Capstone Design Projects with Industry: Using Rubrics to Assess Student

Design Projects. Proceedings of the 2007 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition.

8. Jablokov, Kathryn and D. DeCristoforo. Sorting Out Creativity in Design Assessment. Proceedings of the

2008 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition.

Paper ID #10294

NSFREU Site on Neural Engineering: Aiming at High Research Standards(work in progress)

Dr. Raquel Perez Castillejos, New Jersey Institute of Technology

Dr. Raquel Perez-Castillejos is an assistant professor of Biomedical Engineering at the New Jersey Insti-tute of Technology (NJIT). Her research (www.tissuemodels.net) focuses on the development of tools forcell and tissue biology using micro- and nanotechnologies. Raquel obtained her Ph.D. with the NationalCenter of Microelectronics in Barcelona. She was a postdoctoral fellow at the Laboratory of MiniaturizedSystems (Univ. Sao Paulo, Brasil) and later at Harvard University with the Whitesides group. Dr. Perez-Castillejos is co-director of the NSF-funded REU summer program for Neuroengineering and facultyadvisor for the Society of Women Engineers (SWE) at NJIT.

c©American Society for Engineering Education, 2014

NSF-REU Site on Neural Engineering: Aiming at Professional Research Standards

As described by the National Science Foundation (NSF), REU sites are summer programs that offer Research Experiences to Undergraduates with the goal of “engag[ing] a number of students in research.” In NSF-funded REU programs, about ten students from different parts in the country meet at the REU hosting institution and perform research and career-development activities for 10 weeks. The NSF-funded REU program at our Institute is the first one that focuses on Neural Engineering: a hot topic in research and also highly sought after by students. Neural engineering is a rapidly growing interdisciplinary research area that takes an engineering approach to analyze neurological function and to understand, repair, replace, or enhance the nervous system. The main goal of a neural engineer is to develop solutions to neurological and rehabilitative problems. The REU site in neural engineering (NEURON REU) at the New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT) is led by our biomedical engineering department in collaboration with the medical school. The two institutions collaborating for the NEURON REU are strategically located only 3 blocks apart from one another and they have a joint Ph.D. program, which attests to their long-time research collaboration. Our REU program is organized in research teams consisting of 2-3 students each. Teams work on topics within the 4 main tracks of the very interdisciplinary field of neural engineering: Materials for neural tissue engineering; Neurofunctional and neurobehavior analysis; Multicellular neural tissue engineering; and Neuromuscular control.1 In addition to introducing and encouraging students to pursue advanced degrees in the area of neural engineering, the REU site focuses on preparing students for productive careers in research—either in academia or industry—by means of (a) introducing students to the research process; (b) mentoring students to become independent, intellectual thinkers; and (c) teaching the art of technical communication. With their application form, students select two of the 4 tracks, which helps matching selected applicants with research projects in their favorite topics within neural engineering. Each student research team has a research project and receives the support of one main faculty advisor, one graduate coach, and two or more supporting faculty advisors who work in a similar area of research as the main faculty advisor. The main faculty advisor defines the general hypothesis/ goal of the research project and hosts the student team in her/his laboratory. The graduate coach is a graduate student—an advanced master’s student or a PhD candidate—in the laboratory of the main faculty advisor. Graduate coaches introduce the student team to the basic use of instruments and tools in the lab as well as they serve as mentors for the student team helping them with everyday questions such as how to access the resources available in core facilities in campus or how to locate a substance in the chemical stockroom. Typically, graduate coaches do not contribute intellectually to the research project of the student team and do not typically become co-authors in publications stemming from the research carried out by the research teams. The supporting faculty advisors are faculty members who provide the student team with technical help or resources for their research project. Supporting faculty may be collaborators of the main faculty, may donate cells or animal models, provide access and training for the use of an instrument, or guidance in coding a script on specific software, for example. Supporting faculty also serve as pre-submission reviewers for the poster and abstract developed by the student research team.

In order to implement the main objective of this and all REU Sites (i.e., preparing students for productive careers in research—for this site: research in neural engineering), each team in the REU is given an independent research project. We define independent research project as a project that is (i) related to the work in the lab of the team’s main faculty advisor but has (ii) goals and tasks that are clearly distinct from those carried out by the other students in the lab of the faculty advisor. By having the project related to the work of the faculty advisor, the students become part of the lab quickly and receive the technical support of their lab mates, which is very important during the first weeks of the REU, as students learn how to use the instruments and equipment in the host lab. By having a project that is different from the others in their main advisor lab, the student teams can organize their tasks independently (instead of following the lead of a graduate student) and own the research project (with its associated publications) completely. The NEURON REU projects are also chosen to be self-contained and finishable in 10 weeks. In other words, the goals of the REU projects must be achieved by the end of the 10 weeks of REU program instead of becoming just a part of a larger project in the lab of the main faculty advisor. Because the projects are self-contained, each REU team is expected to submit an abstract to a national conference relevant to the neural engineering field. The possibility of presenting their own work at a national conference motivates the REU students very much during their summer research. The conference chosen for the NEURON REU teams to submit their abstracts to is the Biomedical Engineering Society annual meeting, BMES, which has two deadlines for the submission of research abstracts: one in May for research carried out during the regular academic year, and another one at the end of July for undergraduate summer researchers who would miss the May deadline. Despite the different submission dates, both sets of undergraduate research abstracts go through a review process by the ‘technical program committee’2 consisting of faculty members and researchers technically proficient in the field of biomedical engineering.

Figure 1: Summary of activities for each working day during the 10 weeks of the NEURON REU

program at NJIT.

Publications (including conference abstracts) are the standardly accepted factor to assess the success of professional researchers. Because the main objective of REU sites is to prepare students for productive careers in research, the submission and acceptance of abstracts—written by the students about their own research—is of the utmost relevance in assessing the success of the NEURON REU program. In other words, the REU structure and formal assessment presented here consists of quantifying success through indicators of productivity similar to those of professional researchers. Additional, more traditional assessment tools, which are not within the scope of this paper, are also being used in the NEURON REU3. Establishing the production of an abstract competitive at the national (undergraduate) level as the goal for the teams imposes two main requirements to the REU schedule: (1) as much time as possible must be devoted to research, and (2) progress in the lab must translate into public communications (slides and abstract) constantly, and for the whole length of the REU program. Typically, slides and abstracts are taken care of during the last days of a research program with a selection of the results obtained during the program. Our approach, however, focuses on establishing a clear research objective for each project and requires students (and advisors) to revisit such objective over and over again, in light of the accumulated and latest results. Our approach allows students to visualize the pieces they are missing in the puzzle of their research projects; for example, we do not want to realize that a control for one of our experiments is missing the day when the abstract is due. This approach applies to REU projects the arguments presented in the classic work “Whitesides’ group: writing a paper4.” The weekly schedule of the NEURO REU (Figure 1) includes time for research in the lab (orange, R), workshops with the basics on oral and written research communication (pink, WS), visits to local industries (light blue, V), a mock poster presentation (brown, inPP), and a campus-wide poster presentation (brown, allPP). Note that the first two days of the program (green: WELC, O-S, O-WS) are dedicated to welcoming the students to campus, introducing them to the resources (gym, library, etc.) available for them, and getting their student identification cards and network usernames. Additionally, REU students have times scheduled for weekly meetings: one on Monday morning (MMM) to discuss the evolvements of the previous week—either with the whole REU community or with each team’s lab,—one in the middle of the week (RMM) to work on the research projects from the communication perspective—with the author and, if available, other faculty and graduate students,—and one at the end of the week—with the team members—to prepare the presentation for Monday. These pre-scheduled meetings are not supposed to substitute, but instead to add to the informal conversations during the week with lab mates, graduate coach, and faculty advisor(s). Despite the regularity of the weekly schedule, the goals of the tasks for each week change as the research project progresses, as schematized in Figure 2. During the first week students are required to familiarize themselves with the project, via paper reading and conversations with their lab mates and faculty advisor, and present the project succinctly at the MMM of the second week. By the beginning of the third week, students are requested to provide a project timeline, with milestones and task distribution between team members. Oral presentations and abstracts make it possible to analyze the progress of the research project throughout the weeks and identify any modifications required in the project description and/or timeline—e.g., an unpredicted tool limitation or the damage to a piece of equipment—as well as needed

Figure 2: Sequence of partial and final goals along the 10-week NEURON REU program at NJIT.

administrative actions—e.g., reporting an invention disclosure or requiring an Institutional Review Board (IRB) approval. During the last three weeks, a mock poster presentation is scheduled before the real one with the rest of the undergraduate summer researchers in campus. As an additional tool for coordinating the research tasks in the NEURON REU, we use a web-based, freely available educational tool—namely, a wiki—as a collaborative, interactive, remotely accessible electronic lab notebook (ELN). Wikipedia (probably the most widely known wiki) defines the term wiki “as a website whose users can add, modify, or delete its content [using] a web browser” by means that do not require any previous knowledge of webpage programming5. Wikis have been used previously for educational purposes, for the exchange of information between K-16 educators, and for communication between the members of research labs in higher education settings. In the search for web-based tools that would support access to an electronic lab notebook, we sought to accomplish the following goals for our NEURON REU: interactivity (to provide student-to-student and student-to-faculty interactions), real-time connectivity (to enable the synchronization of tasks between different members of one team and among teams), ease (to empower all users to benefit from the tool regardless of their web coding skills), and privacy (to avoid undesired disclosure of intellectual property). Additionally, we looked for a tool that could be easily adopted by others—for example in other summer programs. For all these reasons, we chose to set our wiki on wikispaces.com6, which provides free use of their wiki-hosting service for educators in K-16 through higher education institutions. As illustrated by Figure 3, the NEURON REU wiki is organized into as many projects (see label ‘Projects’ in the middle box to left of the screen) as student teams in the program. Each project consists of an independent set of pages and files (see label ‘Pages and Files’ in the middle box) that each team populate according to their research results. All projects can be seen by all teams but each team can edit only their own wiki. In the lower box to the left of the screen, links to the ‘REU Google Calendar,’ ‘REU Resources,’ and ‘REU Social Space’ pages feature access to the Google calendar shared by everyone in the REU, to general use resources such as templates and REU logos for the posters, and to photos and details of social activities of the REU participants.

Figure 3: Main page of the Wiki used as the electronic, online lab notebook of the student teams in the NEURON REU.

All teams start with a fairly basic wiki structure that includes the following sections: Home, Calendar, Lab Notebook, Resources, and Team. The page ‘Home’ describes briefly the research project and lists the links to other sections of the project. The ‘Calendar’ page hosts a Google Calendar for the student team with meetings, core facility use appointments, etc. The ‘Lab Notebook’ is day-by-day recapitulation of the experiments and results performed and collected by the team each day. ‘Resources’ typically collects code scripts or software downloads that are needed by the student team in their research activities. Finally, the page ‘Team’ lists the names and emails of all the main members of the team: students, graduate coach, and faculty advisors. Additional to these basic sections, each student team is invited to create as many others as they see fit to their research needs. As an example, Figure 4 displays the main page of the wiki created by the students in the 2013 NEURO-BIOMATERIALS team. It is noteworthy that this team decided to create two additional sections for collecting their weekly ‘Presentations’ and their final ‘Presentation, Abstract, and Poster.’ The wiki-ELN concept provides a number of benefits to the REU participants—both students and faculty members—as it allows to (i) synchronize different activities carried out simultaneously by different members of a team at different locations/labs using, for example, a smart phone, (ii) document the research progress continuously—which emphasizes the importance of reporting the research process continuously, not only when some experiment “works”—and (iii) receive and answer comments from peers, which develops student awareness of the relevance of peer review in scientific research.

Figure 4: Main page of the Wiki by the 2013 NEURO-BIOMATERIALS team.

All participants of the REU (students and faculty members) have welcomed the use of the wiki-based electronic lab notebook (wiki-ELN). Overall, the major users of the wiki-ELN are those interacting with research results on a daily basis: that is, undergraduate students and graduate coaches. According to answers to free-response questions collected with a last-day survey, for these REU participants the wiki-ELN was key in (i) keeping all members of the team up to date about results and progress achieved by each member of the team—especially when they were not together in one location—and in (ii) recording and retaining easy access to research data. For the research advisors and the leadership of the NEURON REU program, the wiki-ELN ensures long-term retention of all data associated with the program, avoiding deletion of data by mistake by automatically keeping a copy of any file before modifying or deleting it.

We believe that our effort to focus the attention of the students and faculty members onto producing nationally competitive abstracts reporting on own research yields higher standards for the way research is performed. The expectations are obviously different when the results are to be presented in campus compared to results that need to compete with peers (summer undergraduate researchers) for a spot on a national conference. Such expectations generate friendly competition between student teams and even between faculty advisors, who realize the outcomes of the summer research projects will become public and if successful, they will also become part of their research curriculum vitae. The structure of the NEURON REU site, emphasizing data recording with a wiki-ELN and featuring times throughout the 10 weeks of the program for training the students in the art of technical public communication, has been proven successful by the same indicator used to quantify productivity of professional researchers—that is, publications and among those, abstracts published in the proceedings of competitive, relevant, national conferences such as BMES. Records show that after two years of running the REU on neural engineering, each and all of the student teams (eight) have been able to submit an abstract to the BMES conference, with seven of the teams having their abstract accepted after review by professionals in the field. Of those accepted abstracts, six were chosen for poster presentation whereas one was selected for one of the very competitive sessions of oral presentations—in this case, only 1 out of 10 accepted abstracts were selected for oral presentation instead of poster presentation. We believe that other REU sites may find it useful to emphasize abstract submission and public presentation at technically reviewed, competitive conferences, which increases the engagement of all the REU participants involved, from the undergraduate students to the faculty advisors.

References: [1] REU site on Neural Engineering: http://neuroengineering.njit.edu [2] BMES Abstract Submission: http://bmes.org/abstract. [3] J. D. Carpinelli, L. S. Hirsh, H. Kimmel, A. J. Perna, and R. Rockland, “A survey to measure undergraduate

engineering students'attitudes toward graduate studies” 1st Int. Conf. Research in Engineering Education, 2007.

[4] G. M. Whitesides, “Whitesides’ group: writing a paper” Adv. Mater. 16(15):1375-7, 2004. [5] Wiki, as defined on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki [6] Wikispaces: http://www.wikispaces.com

Paper ID #8963

Flipping the Biomedical Engineering Classroom: Implementation and As-sessment in Medical Electronics Course

Dr. Jean-Michel I. Maarek, University of Southern California

Jean-Michel I. Maarek received his engineering degree in Chemical Engineering in 1980 from the Ecoledes Mines in Nancy, France, his Doctorat Ingenieur in Biomedical Engineering in 1984 from the Univer-site Paris Val-de-Marne in Creteil, France, and his M.S. degree in Education in 1997 from the Universityof Southern California. His research interests include engineering education, in relation to the use ofinformation technology for teaching and learning in the undergraduate classroom.

c©American Society for Engineering Education, 2014

Flipping the Biomedical Engineering Classroom

Implementation and Assessment in Medical Electronics Course (Work in

Progress)

Background:

The flipped classroom paradigm inverts the traditional “teaching/lecture – learning/homework”

model by delivering the instruction online outside of classroom and placing the active part of the

instruction, the “homework” into the classroom. Typically, the learning content is delivered

through recorded lecture videos, by the students reading short articles, visiting websites, and

other modes of content delivery. Application of the lecture content is done in the classroom

usually in small groups in the form of problem solving, laboratory activities (virtual or physical),

group learning etc. with guidance by the instructor. The flipped classroom paradigm was first

introduced 2007 for teaching high school science (1, 2) but has since attracted science and

engineering instructors in universities and colleges (3, 4). Among its main benefits, the flipped

classroom enables students to receive the most support when they are working on the most

cognitively demanding tasks. The flipped classroom increases interaction between instructor and

student and between student and student. This is beneficial since peer teaching is thought to

greatly enhance learning. The students learn to work in teams as most will do in their

professional life. The students are made responsible learners in charge of their own learning and

can receive individualized instruction to remediate weaknesses or misconceptions. The students

can view the video lectures multiple times, which can benefit those who struggle with the

material. Students do not miss presentation of the lecture material due to illness or absences. The

classroom environment is more dynamic, lively, and focused on the application of the material

learned in the video lectures. There is more time in the classroom to work on complex problems

including simulations and open-ended real-life or simulated design exercises.

The flipped classroom paradigm is being implemented in “Medical Electronics”, a required

course within our undergraduate curriculum. Approximately 50 engineering students, juniors and

seniors, enroll in this semester-long course every year. The goal of the course is to introduce

students to the analysis and design of analog electronic circuits at the core of biomedical

instruments. The students learn about essential functions such as signal sensing, direct current

(dc) power generation, signal amplification, and conditioning, and about the electronic

components used to implement these functions: bio-transducers, diodes, transistors, and

operational amplifiers.

The course learning objectives include: 1) the ability to explain the operation of bio-transducers

(electrodes, thermistors, strain gages), diodes, transistors, and operational amplifiers; 2) the

ability to analyze and design linear dc power supplies, signal amplifiers, electronic filters, and

comparators; 3) the ability to assemble, test, and troubleshoot in the laboratory hardware circuits

that implement these functions; and 4) the ability to interact cooperatively within a student team

working on laboratory circuits and a project. The subject matter requires understanding the

theoretical operation of electronic components and learning how to analyze and design

fundamental circuits built with these components. The skills required for circuit analysis and

design are essential to learning the subject matter, which implies systematic practice on exercises

where students analyze or design electronic circuits.

Prior to adopting the flipped classroom approach, the classroom activities comprised short

lecture segments presented with Powerpoint presentations interspersed with application exercises

called “activities” in which the students worked alone or in groups of two to analyze an

electronic circuit related to the preceding lecture segment. Occasionally, the activity used the

circuit simulation software “Multisim” that allowed the students to conduct virtual experiments

in which they built and tested simulated circuits, or experimented with a faulty component, to

visualize and understand how the fault affects circuit behavior. During the activities, the

instructor walked in the classroom to help the students unable to complete the activity on their

own and gage the group’s understanding of the content application presented in the activity.

When it appeared that a majority of students had completed the activity, a formal solution was

presented to the class; students’ questions were answered and the next lecture segment was

presented. The lecture segments and activities each comprised approximately 50% of the

classroom time. Changing to the flipped classroom approach represents an evolution of the prior

approach in which the lecture content is moved outside of the classroom and ahead of the

activities which now represent the bulk of the in-class work.

Implementation of online content for flipping the “Medical Electronics” course:

The implementation plan called for first, designing and developing the online video lessons and

posting them on the learning management system “Blackboard”. The online lessons are watched

by the students prior coming to class and include a few sample practice problems for the students

to practice application of the lesson material to solve circuit analysis exercises. The students

prepare one or more questions to bring to class. Second, in the classroom the instructor and the

students address some of the students’ questions. The students then engage in group activities

centered on circuit analysis and design problems and virtual laboratory exercises using the

simulation software “Multisim”.

Design of learning content and assessment approach:

The backwards design approach is applied to design the learning content. In this approach, the

content designer first defines “SMART” learning objectives for each lesson, in which SMART is

an acronym for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Result-focused, and Time-focused (5). Each

learning objective must be specific such that its achievement can be measured through formal or

informal assessment. The objective must be attainable given the prior knowledge and abilities of

the students, as well as the available time and resources. The learning objectives are result-

focused in that the content designer must consider what results one is looking for and how one

will know the learning objectives have been achieved. Last the learning objectives must be time-

focused in that the objectives build on each other and, as a group, must fit within the available

time for the course.

Assessment of the flipped classroom has often been based on qualitative student-perception

surveys (6). In our case, assessment of the flipped classroom in comparison to the prior

approach comprises formative assessment including for instance considering how well students

understand and problem-solve for topics known to be troublesome. Summative assessment is

done by testing the students in exams and quizzes using a bank of multiple choice problem

solving questions. Performance of the students can be compared for cohorts taught with the prior

approach and the current cohort. Since the most able students are likely to perform at a similar

level with the two approaches, the comparison is focused on the bottom third of the students who

may be more engaged and compelled to apply the course content in multiple situations with

feedback from their classmates and the instructor. Table 1below shows examples of learning

objectives and corresponding assessment items for the lesson on diode rectifiers and linear dc

power supplies.

Table 1: Example of paired learning objectives/assessment items identified prior to the design of

the learning content.

Process assessment includes checking attendance to determine if the students are more inclined

to attend class than in the past. In addition, a rubric completed by an observer and scored on a 1-

4 Likert scale is used to rate acquired skills, group interaction, and teamwork. Items in the rubric

include:

Apply fundamental laws of circuit analysis to simplify a circuit and solve for the

requested parameters

Recognize fundamental circuit blocks in a circuit

Apply analysis methods for the circuits blocks above to derive output voltage or current

Interpret the output of a Multisim-simulated circuit using understanding of components

and circuit blocks

Identify and locate a fault in a circuit based on observed output vs. predicted output

Select fundamental circuit blocks and realistic components to design a circuit block that

satisfies specified design requirements

Apply knowledge and strategies learned in class to analyze a circuit that is different from

those studied in class Implemented a circuit or system to meet specified design requirements Considered alternatives to solving the design problem Use judgment to recognize improbable values and erroneous computations in the analysis

of a circuit Clear explanation of process, solution, or reasoning that appears convincing to the class

Planning and division of labor. Efficient and accurate planning and solution formation

Implementation of on-line learning content:

The learning content comprises video lessons developed with PowerPoint to present the course

material in a series of 15 lessons, each corresponding to approximately one week of course

content. The content is interspersed with sample exercises which require application of

previously presented content to analyze a typical circuit. Some exercises include presentation of

a detailed solution while others are not solved in the presentation and left for the students to

solve on their own.

After a video lesson is developed, a script of the narration is prepared to provide the text to be

included in the audio part of the lesson. The screencasting software Camtasia is then used to

include a narration and animations in the form of callouts to the PowerPoint lessons. A quality

USB microphone, such as model AT2020 from Audio-Technica is used for the sound recording.

To narrate the lessons using the text script while navigating through the slide presentation, it is

convenient to use a computer system with two video monitors. After the audio narration is

completed, it is edited within Camtasia to remove verbal “hedges” and add the callouts. In

particular, callouts are used to prompt the students to stop the presentations and solve the sample

problems before reading through the solution. An MP4 video file of each lesson is generated

within Camtasia for posting on the Blackboard website associated with the Medical Electronics

course. An example of activity exercise and related solution included in the video lesson on

Zener diodes is shown in Figure 1. . The duration of the video lessons vary between 15 and 30

minutes, with the intent of assigning no more than 15 min of viewing at a time.

Figure 1: Example of exercise slides included in a video presentation

Applying the flipped classroom paradigm to the Medical Electronics course:

The video lessons and in-class activities developed using the flipped classroom are tested during

the 2014 Spring semester during the entire semester and with the instructor who previously

taught the course with the traditional format. The first 15 min of class time are spent with the

students discussing in small groups their lesson summary, answering each other’s questions, and

comparing solutions to the sample problems from the lessons. Students then work collaboratively

to solve circuit analysis problems, including computer simulation exercises developed with

National Instruments “Multisim” which test their understanding of circuit behavior when

components change or become faulty. Open-ended design activities allow the students to design

a circuit and test their design against pre-defined design requirements within the circuit

simulation environment. During that time, the instructor circulates in the classroom to provide

individualized and small group guidance. We expect that this first implementation will help us

gain experience with the approach and improve the on-line content using the results of the

assessment and feedback from the students. Note that the total amount of work required of the

students for the course remains approximately the same as that required of them in the traditional

format. Homework assignments are reduced by approximately 60% to make room for watching

the video lessons and doing the practice exercises included in the lessons.

Application, analysis, and evaluation, are essential traits associated with engineering education

that are promoted in the flipped classroom paradigm. By increasing the amount of time the

students spend engaged in circuit analysis and design problems, and enriching the environment

in which these activities are performed with peer learning and instructor feedback, the flipped

classroom paradigm appears well suited for teaching and learning electronics in biomedical

engineering curricula. Our experience will reveal some of the essential benefits of this

pedagogical model for engineering education.

References:

1. http://www.thedailyriff.com/articles/how-the-flipped-classroom-is-radically-transforming-

learning-536.php (origin of the flipped classroom by the teachers who first implemented it Jon

Bergmann and Aaron Sams)

2. http://www.knewton.com/flipped-classroom/ (introductory presentation to the flipped classroom)

3. http://stepcentral.net/groups/posts/532/ (Dr. Cynthia Furse – flipped electrical engineering

classroom at the University of Utah). Also Dr. Furse’s lectures at:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1puv0n3oWvY&list=PLF644C08887BE0EA6

4. Bishop, J.L., and Verleger, M.A. (2013). The flipped classroom: a survey of research. ASEE

Annual Conference, paper ID # 6219

5. http://www.sophia.org/what-is-the-flipped-classroom/what-is-the-flipped-classroom--3-tutorial

(professional development tutorial on the flipped classroom)

6. Rockland, R.H., Hirsch, L, Burr-Alexander, L., Carpinelli, J.D., and Kimmel, H.S. (2013).

Learning outside the classroom – Flipping an undergraduate circuits analysis course. ASEE Annual

Conference, Paper ID # 6022

Paper ID #9184

Works in Progress: Development of a need-based BME design course focusedon current NICU challenges

Mr. Kyle Steven Martin, University of Virginia

Kyle Martin is a graduate student at the University of Virginia in Dr. Shayn Peirce-Cottler’s laboratory.Kyle’s research is focused on agent-based modeling of skeletal muscle function and fibrosis. He is equallyinterested in teaching and has been both a TA and co-teacher, as well as attends workshops and seminarsconcerning teaching methods and academic jobs.

Dr. Pamela Marie Norris, University of Virginia

Pamela Norris is the Frederick Tracy Morse Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at theUniversity of Virginia and the Associate Dean of Research and Graduate Programs. A native Virginian,she received her Ph.D. from Georgia Institute of Technology in 1992 working in the area of heat transferin diesel engine cylinder heads. She then served as a Visiting Scholar and a Visiting Lecturer at the Uni-versity of California at Berkeley from 1993-1994, where she developed her interests in microscale heattransfer and aerogels while working in the laboratory of Chang-Lin Tien. In 1994 Pam joined the Mechan-ical and Aerospace Engineering Department at UVA where she received a National Science FoundationCAREER award in 1995, was promoted to Professor in 2004, was named the Frederick Tracy Morseendowed chair in 2010, and she accepted the Associate Dean position in early 2012.

Dr. Shayn M. Peirce, University of Virginia

Dr. Shayn Peirce-Cottler is an Associate Professor with her primary appointment in the Department ofBiomedical Engineering and secondary appointments in the Department of Ophthalmology and Depart-ment of Plastic Surgery at the University of Virginia (UVa). She received her Bachelors of Science degreesin Biomedical Engineering and Engineering Mechanics from The Johns Hopkins University in 1997. Sheearned her Ph.D. in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at the UVa in 2002. A past recipient ofthe MIT Technology Review’s ”TR100 Young Innovator Award” and the National Biomedical Engineer-ing Society’s ”Rita Schaffer Young Investigator Award”, Dr. Peirce-Cottler researches how blood vesselsgrow and remodel in response to diseases, such as diabetes, heart disease, and cancer. She and her re-search team combine experimental and computational modeling approaches to understand the complexweb of molecular signals and cellular behaviors that contribute to vascular adaptations in tissues. Herlab also investigates the roles of circulating immune and progenitor cells in microvascular growth, whichinforms their translational investigation of adult stem cell therapies for tissue regeneration. Dr. Peirce-Cottler teaches courses to undergraduate students, graduate students, and medical students on the topicsof computational systems bioengineering and medical device design and commercialization.

c©American Society for Engineering Education, 2014

Works in Progress:

Development of a need-based BME design course

focused on current NICU challenges

Extended Abstract

Design is a vital component to an undergraduate engineering education and a critical criteria for

ABET accreditation1. At the University of Virginia, in addition to the fourth year final design

course, we offer design courses each year of the undergraduate curriculum to teach the

fundamentals of design (from needs identification and brainstorming to manufacturing and

commercialization). In spring 2013 we introduced significant changes to our required second

year level semester-long design course aimed at teaching the ambit of BME research as well as

developing design principles and practices.

Background

Historically, this course has two main objectives: introducing new engineering students to the

vast field of biomedical engineering and to developing designs with faculty and

engineering/medical professionals. While looking for projects to assign our students in the spring

of 2013, we took a tour of our hospital’s Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) with a

neonatologist who had mentored a team the previous year. While on this tour, we realized the

NICU had numerous and diverse needs that could be addressed with our class. Instead of

assigning projects, our goal was to challenge the students to address a current NICU need which

would improve their communication skills, professionalism, and research abilities. To this end,

we re-designed our course such that it focused exclusively on the real-world clinical needs in the

NICU while maintaining our ambitious goal for the students: to create a working prototype of

their project by the end of the semester.

Course elements

We invited our assisting neonatologist to give a lecture concerning the conditions and limitations

associated with present technology used to support premature infants. This talk outlined both

their medical conditions (e.g., skin sensitivity/susceptibility, breathing and oxygen regulation), as

well as current methods to support and protect the infants (e.g., incubators, monitoring devices).

The doctor also outlined numerous problems currently plaguing the NICU. Students were

encouraged to ask questions and write follow-up emails to willing doctors, nurses, and families.

Additionally, we created a unique learning experience by organizing a visit to the NICU. Under

the supervision of our collaborating neonatologist, each team was allowed to observe current

conditions, watch procedures, analyze unoccupied equipment, and ask questions to consenting

nurses, doctors, and parents. We focused on promoting the students’ abilities to identify

problems and determine the needs of the clients (staff, infants). Figure 1 shows a representative

example of one of the observed problems and our design process from class. Students were free

to choose any complication they observed to work on and many created solutions for sanitation,

equipment securement, and staff monitoring.

Team organization

We decided to divide the class up randomly into eight teams of ten students. We felt justified

doing this because groups of mixed GPAs preform as well as groups with all high GPAs2.

However, studies have shown that large teams have more difficulty managing their time,

agreeing on tasks, and dividing labor3. To mitigate this effect, we implemented a few policies.

One lecture a week was dedicated to team meeting time. Each team was assigned a

mentor/advisor who was either a graduate student or a volunteering senior undergraduate

student. The mentors were instructed to guide their discussions and offer feedback throughout

the design process. Weekly memos were assigned to keep the teams learning and working

towards their prototype. Each memo was intended to accent a particular part of the engineering

design process (identify a need, constraints identification, brainstorming, CAD design, market

analysis, etc.). At the end of the semester, each team presented their designs to the class. The

designs were judged by BME faculty based on innovation, marketability, and feasibility.

Biomedical engineering overview

We split the semester into blocks of material focused on specific BME disciplines. Due to our

limited time, we decided to highlight topics that have active research at the University of

Virginia. The sub-genres we chose to introduce included: electrical, computational, chemical and

material engineering. Individual classes were dedicated to setting up engineering problems

correctly and working through solutions in class. Each block was capped with a panel discussion.

Faculty were invited to give small overviews of their current research. Afterwards the students

were able to ask questions pertaining to current research in that field. Additionally, multiple

lectures throughout the course were focused on design principles and tools, such as CAD, patent

searching, market analysis, etc.

Another novel aspect of the course was the inclusion of a graduate teaching fellow to co-teach

the course. Our engineering school offers graduate students the opportunity to gain teaching

experience by applying for competitive teaching fellow positions. The teaching fellow must

participate in all aspects of the course, including syllabus generation, grading, teaching, and

Figure 1. Students discovered high-frequency oscillatory ventilation tubing was

difficult to secure, where the solution devised by the NICU nurses consisted of

stuffing blankets in the port of the incubator (left). A design was created using a

CAD program (middle) and rapid prototyped using a 3D printer (right).

student evaluation. This unique combination of teachers increased direct instructor/student

interactions and offered multiple perspectives on topics and discussions.

Preliminary results

Our course changes were intended to immerse our students in a need-driven design course. And

we had a lofty goal of creating working prototypes by the end of the semester. Of the ten design

teams this year, every team was able to create a prototype. Additionally, three teams filed

provisional patents by the end of the semester. This is a marked increase over the one patent filed

from the two previous years combined (30% vs 12.5%). One of our teams also entered a pan-

university design competition and managed to finish second place. Two teams have expressed

interest in continuing their designs. The average grade for our renovated design course was a

90.6 ± 4.9. This was slightly lower than the previous two years (92.3 ± 2.8 and 92.9 ± 2.1).

However, their patients and competition success provides evidence that the teams spent more

time and effort on their designs than previous years.

Student evaluations indicated mixed feelings about the course. In the anonymous course

evaluations, a few students reported wanting to visit the NICU sooner and more frequently (8 out

of 51 responders) which will be difficult to accomplish since the NICU is a traffic sensitive area.

Only 2 students expressed dislike for the NICU design. As for the course structure, students

enjoyed the faculty panels (3.91 out of 5 rating, 81 responders) but wished they had more time to

learn each engineering module. Additionally, many students felt the class was laborious and

rushed (15 of 51 responders). We knew we had lofty goals for our students, a working prototype

in 15 weeks, but all of the teams were able to fulfill this requirement. Many projects, as indicated

by our provisional patents, well exceeded our expectations. In short, our design class has a lot of

promise, but needs some refining in terms of work load and pacing.

Summary

Overall, the design course allowed the students to work on real-world engineering problems

related to patient care in the NICU. Each student was given the opportunity to learn how to

access challenges and constraints involved in design. Additionally, multiple groups filed

provisional patents and entered design competitions in an effort to continue moving their designs

toward commercialization. Since this was a pilot course, formal evaluations of the NICU design

challenge would be conducted once this course is repeated.

Works Cited

1: Commission, A.E.A. Engineering accreditation criteria. 2012-2013 Available from:

http://www.abet.org/uploadedFiles/Accreditation/Accreditation_Process/Accreditation_Documents/Current/eac-

criteria-2012-2013.pdf

2: Taylor AC, Mason K, Starling AL, Allen TE, & Peirce SM. (2010) Impact of team and advisor demographics and

formulation on the successes of the biomedical engineering senior design projects. Proceedings for the 2010 ASEE

Annual Conference and Exposition. Best Paper Award for the Biomedical Engineering Division

3: Griffin, P.M., S.O. Griffin, and D.C. Llewellyn, The impact of group size and project duration on capstone

design. Journal of Engineering Education, 2004. 93: p. 185-193.

Paper ID #10573

Interactive Web-based Virtual Environment for Learning Single-Use Bioman-ufacturing Technologies

Dr. Yakov E. Cherner, ATEL, LLC

Dr. Yakov E. Cherner, a Founder and President of ATEL, LLC, taught science, engineering and technologydisciplines to high school, college and university students. He has extensive experience in writing cur-ricula and developing educational software and efficient instructional strategies. Dr. Cherner introducedan innovative concept of multi-layered simulation-based conceptual teaching of science and technology.This instructional approach uses real-world objects, processes and learning situations that are familiarto students as the context for virtual science, engineering and technology investigations. He also pro-posed and implemented the pioneering concept of integrated adjustable virtual laboratories. To facilitatethese methodologies for academic education, corporate and military training, his company developed newground-breaking e-learning solutions, as well as relevant assessment and authoring tools. Dr. Chernerholds an MS in Experimental Physics, and Ph.D. in Physics and Materials Science. He published over90 papers in national and international journals and made dozens presentations at various national andinternational conferences and workshops. Dr. Cherner has served as a Principal Investigator for severalgovernment-funded educational projects.

Mr. Bruce R Van Dyke, Quincy College

Bruce Van Dyke received a BS in Chemistry from the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) and MSin Biochemistry from Western Washington University. He spent 17 years performing biomedical researchin the Biology Department at UCSD and five years in industrial research in Seattle, Washington. Afterleaving industry, Bruce joined the biotechnology program at Shoreline Community College in Seattlewhere he developed and taught courses in biotechnology. In 2006, he was invited to join Sonia Wallmanand the Northeast Biomanufacturing Center and Collaborative (NBC2) in Portsmouth, New Hampshirewhere he spent five years teaching in the biomanufacturing program. Bruce is currently the Chair of theBiotechnology and Compliance Program at Quincy College in Quincy, MA and a consultant for NBC2.

c©American Society for Engineering Education, 2014

Work in Progress: Interactive Web-based Virtual Environment for Learning Single-Use Biomanufacturing Technologies

Abstract

This paper presents the first phase of a highly interactive, comprehensive learning environment for teaching industrial scale single-use biopharmaceutical manufacturing. This simulation-based e-learning module focuses on upstream processing, using completely disposable technology and equipment. This module can be run in the following three modes: Introduction, Practice, and Assessment. Introduction The adoption of single-use technologies is an increasing trend in today’s biopharmaceutical manufacturing. Disposable systems, which are easy to use and maintain, and are therefore cost efficient, will replace relatively inflexible, hard-piped equipment, including large stainless steel bioreactors and tanks. However, many life science and biotechnology companies are facing shortages in personnel skilled in single-use technologies. To assist in training of biopharma manufacturing technicians and address the increasing demand in educational materials for disposable technologies, Quincy College (MA) has combined efforts with the Massachusetts based company ATeL for developing a highly interactive, comprehensive, online learning environment for teaching and learning the latest industrial scale, disposable biomanufacturing technologies. This project is partially supported by a Department of Labor TAACCCT Grant. Web-based Virtual Environment

A set of interactive online modules and simulation-based virtual laboratories (v-Labs) form the core of this e-learning environment. The environment also includes online lessons, assessments, a glossary, and supporting materials. The e-learning system design adapts and integrates cognitive information processing, systems analysis, and adult learning theories. It employs effective “learning-by-doing” and problem-based learning methodologies [1, 2]. Students process new knowledge and master complex operational and maintenance skills in such a way that it makes sense to them in their own frame of reference. According to contextual learning theory, learning skills and acquiring knowledge "in context" is the most efficient learning strategy [4, 5]. The software has a flexible multi-layered and open-ended architecture. All learning and teaching resources are based on a uniform pedagogical approach and conceptually organized in such a manner that they compliment each other and enable students to tackle the leaning subject from several directions.

In this paper, only the modules developed for studying upstream processing and exploring the design of related single-use systems are discussed. Additional modules are also being developed. The first module (Figure 1) allows students to explore the upstream process flow diagram. Student can select and expand a flowchart box and examine the process stage represented by the selected box. In the panels on the right, a step description, video clip, diagram, table, or any other relevant multimedia resource can be displayed. Each panel has a navigation bar that enables the user to switch between resources.

Figure 1. Upstream processing overall flow. A screenshot of the e-Learning Environment on single-use biomanufacturing. The panel on the left presents an expandable flowchart of upstream processing using disposable technology. A description of the selected procedure is shown in the top right panel. A video clip that demonstrates how the procedure is performed by an expert is displayed in the bottom right panel.

After reviewing the upstream process workflow, the student can explore the systems and devices utilized at each step of upstream processing in great detail. The upstream production line diagram (Figure 2) demonstrates to students that prior to cell growth in a bioreactor, the culture should be scaled-up through a series of cell culture vessels of increasing size before the use of a bioreactor. The importance of maintaining cell line-specific densities during scale-up is emphasized. The student is able to click on any equipment and open its enlarged 3D image in a separate window. The window can be further expanded to display the equipment description and major parameters. Interactive simulations that visualize equipment operation are available

as well. These simulations also enable students to gain or enhance their skills in performing the related procedures. For example, the simulation shown in the bottom left of Figure 2 helps students master online the aseptic techniques of cell culture using spinner flasks as incubation containers, and better understand all precautions and requirements to prevent cross contamination.

Figure 2. Upstream processing in detail. Top left: an interactive diagram shows an entire chain of disposable equipment used in upstream processing. Top right: a panel displays the description of the technological step that is facilitated by the selected equipment. Bottom right: an enlarged 3D-image of the selected equipment. Bottom left: a fragment of the software interface that allows the student to master operational skills online.

The combination of interactive simulations with synchronized multimedia learning resources helps the student master operational and maintenance skills online and prepare for more efficient performance of a similar task in the actual laboratory or in their workplace. Simulations demonstrate how to prepare for operating a single-use bioreactor (Figure 3, left). They also allow students to load a disposable bag into the virtual bioreactor, using a computer mouse and a keyboard. Step-by step instructions to complete this procedure are also displayed (Figure 3, top right). Students can watch how a bag is being loaded by an experienced biomanufacturing technician (Figure 3, bottom right).

Figure 3. Loading a disposable bag into a bioreactor. An example of an assembly exercise for a virtual single-use bioreactor. Instructions for loading a disposable bag are displayed in the top right panel. A video presenting preparation of a disposable bag is shown in the bottom right panel.

Figure 4. Controlling a bioreactor. An interface for mastering skills in process control and virtual single-use bioreactor operation. The table in the top right panel displays the current process parameters. The parameter highlighted in red is outside the setpoint range and the system is in the alarm state. The table shown in the bottom right window enables the user to specify process setpoints and allowed deviation ranges.

E-Learning modules enable students to learn how to operate equipment and control processes. The screenshots presented in Figure 4 illustrate monitoring of cell growth in a 2000 L single-use bioreactor. Cell growth in a bioreactor requires steady state conditions. Therefore, the student must initially use a pop-up table (Figure 4, bottom right) to specify optimal values of the process parameters and allowed deviation ranges. During cell growth, any parameter outside the set limit is highlighted in red (Figure 4, top right) and the program sends a warning message. The student has to decide how to fix the problem (e.g. add base, adjust temperature, add antifoam, etc). The online modules which form the core of the virtual laboratory can be run in three modes: Introduction, Practice, and Assessment. The Introduction mode introduces students to the major processes and equipment operation. In this mode, students can observe step-by-step disposable upstream processing procedures and get familiar with design, functions and interconnections of major production systems and devices. The Practice mode enables students to perform interactive virtual experiments that match experimental tasks which students will face in their biomanufacturing college labs and workplaces. If a student enters an incorrect process control parameter, the system flags it for correction. In addition, students can collect and handle data from the virtual process. Detailed step-by-step on-screen instructions guide students through the online experiments. Various online textbooks, presentations, technical manuals, Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs), audio, video and other multimedia educational resources, which are associated with the experiments and address the education and training needs of biopharmaceutical technicians, are instantly available to the students for just-in-time learning. In the Assessment mode, performance-based and sequential tests help students to self-evaluate their knowledge and progress. Students are required to complete technical processes with minimal or no instruction. The program tracks the user’s actions, grades system-generated quizzes, and records the elapsed time. At any one time, 48 Quincy College students use the virtual e-learning modules in their required biomanufacturing and compliance courses, alongside hands-on laboratory experiments. Virtual experiments are performed prior to actual experiments in preparation for hands-on practice in the college laboratory. Soon, this program will be available free of charge, allowing numerous students to benefit. Upstream processing, as discussed above, can be broken down as follows:

Scale-up: Grow cells in several increasing increments, from frozen stocks, to plates, to stirred cell flasks, to wave bags, and, finally, to a bioreactor. Students need to know cell line-specific requirements (titer (cell density), media, growth rates, gas requirements) and calculate required titer for plating and expansion. Additionally, students are required to identify each connector and its function on the stirred cells, wave bags, and bioreactor bags, and to assemble equipment and setup software.

Analytical techniques (Quality Control): Daily sampling to monitor approximately ten parameters to determine the health of the culture. The module will require students to

o Understand acceptable ranges for each assay o Perform each assay

o Analyze data o Determine the health of each culture

Harvest: Remove cells from bioreactor via sterile filtration (ultra filtration, tangential flow filtration).

Online assignments are extremely helpful in teaching students the correct order of events for successfully performing real experiments, and give them confidence in their ability to properly perform these procedures. The students study subjects and practice technical hands-on skills online at their own pace, when and where they chose, without the risk of wasting valuable laboratory materials and time. In addition, students are able to repeat virtual experiments several times within a reasonable time frame. Blended learning, using the combination of virtual activities and actual disposable equipment in the college laboratory, helps students better understand the procedures they perform, and enhances students’ comprehension of the underlying chemical and biological processes. In addition, Quincy College biomanufacturing faculty use the interactive animations for lesson demonstrations. We believe that the combination of online and hands-on learning ensures integration of theoretical knowledge and practical skills, and enhances students’ understanding of workplace performance. Our future plans include thorough testing to evaluate the effectiveness of the virtual labs as teaching tools, and comparing the impact on student learning from hybrid labs versus the sole use of hands-on labs or virtual labs. References:

1. Lee, M. E. (1999), Distance Learning as "Learning by Doing". Educational Technology & Society 2 (3), from http://ifets.ieee.org/periodical/vol_3_99/mary_e_lee.html

2. National Research Council Committee on Learning Research and Educational Practice. (1999). How people learn: Bridging research and practice. Washington, DC: National Academy Press.

3. Contextual Teaching and Learning, Center for Occupational Research and Development (CORD Inc.), Waco, TX, 2008: http://www.cord.org/http://www.cord.org/contextual-teaching-and-learning/

4. Martin, L. (2008), Learning in Context, ASTC - Resource Center, 2009, http://www.astc.org/resource/education/learning_martin.htm

Paper ID #9867

Designing Biomedical Engineering Summer Programs for Undergraduatesand High School Students: A Case Study of a Work-in-Progress

Mrs. Catherine Langman, Illinois Institute of Technology

Catherine Langman is a graduate student and research assistant at the Illinois Institute of Technology. Sheholds a B.S. in applied mathematics from Illinois Institute of Technology, as well as a certificate to teachsecondary mathematics from the State of Illinois.

Prof. Eric M Brey, Illinois Institute of Technology

Professor Eric Brey is a Professor of Biomedical Engineering and co-Director of Distinctive Education inthe Armour College of Engineering at the Illinois Institute of Technology.

Dr. Judith S Zawojewski, Illinois Institute of Technology

Dr. Zawojewski received her B.S. Ed. from Northwestern University, M.S. Ed. from National Col-lege of Education (now National-Louis University) and her Ph.D. from Northwestern University. Sherecently retired as Associate Professor Emerita from Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, and insemi-retirement has joined the University of Chicago Center for Elementary Science and MathematicsEducation as a Senior Curriculum Developer. She recently served on the Board of Directors for the Na-tional Council of Teachers of Mathematics and on the Editorial Panel for Mathematics Teaching in theMiddle School. She has published in numerous teaching and research journals, and written books andbook chapters for both mathematics and engineering educators. In addition, Dr. Zawojewski has longbeen active in writing curriculum related to problem solving, mathematical modeling, and performanceassessment. In particular, Dr. Zawojewski is interested in the role of modeling and problem solving indeveloping mathematical capabilities, and in enhancing mathematics education for all students.

c©American Society for Engineering Education, 2014

Designing Biomedical Engineering Summer Programs for Undergraduates and High School Students:

A Work-in-Progress Extended Abstract

This work-in-progress, qualitative study focuses on the design of a collaborative biomedical engineering-themed program, in which approximately 10-16 undergraduate students from across the United States in a Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) program partner with approximately 16-32 urban high school students in a summer engineering-themed enrichment program (Summer Program) to communicate about biomedical engineering research. This week-long collaborative program is imbedded within two larger programs with separate but overlapping goals. The goal of the REU Program is to immerse undergraduates in biomedical engineering laboratories to conduct cutting-edge diabetes research in an effort to influence their long-term interests in science and engineering. The goal of the Summer Program is to bring approximately 100 diverse, high-achieving, urban rising juniors and seniors to a college campus to learn a variety of STEM-oriented programming, in an effort to influence their long-term interests in STEM fields and education.

The objective of the partnership between the REU Program and the Summer Program focuses on developing tier-mentorship experiences for both groups. A separate facet of the REU Program includes mentorship from graduate students who actively contribute to the development of the undergraduates in the REU Program. By including high school students as a group with whom the undergraduates can interact, the undergraduates gain the experience of acting as a mentor, in addition to being mentored. Similarly, by introducing the high school students in the Summer Program to undergraduates who are actively pursuing a field of study in which the high school students expressed an interest, the high school students gained a mentor who had valuable information about the college experience and, in particular, the experience of a biomedical engineering student to share.

Over the last two summers, the collaboration between the REU Program and Summer

Program has involved communication between the undergraduates to the high school students of their research through a variety of tools, including lab tours, demonstrations, activities and discussions. The high school students and undergraduates then collaborate to develop activities and games about biological phenomena related to biomedical engineering to present to middle school students in a nearby summer program. The poster will include a schedule of the program and examples of the activities created by the undergraduates for the high school students and by the collaboration between the undergraduates and the high school students for the middle school students.

As this collaboration enters its third summer, the design of the week-long program has

changed to reflect feedback from both the undergraduates in the REU and the high school students in the Summer Program. This paper and poster session will present an overview of the collaboration in the past two years, the redesign of the programming for this summer, the data sets that will be gathered before, during, and after the programming, and the anticipated use of the data sets.

Redesign of the Collaboration for Summer 2014 Changes to the collaboration are made using two tools: (1) feedback from the participants in the collaboration and (2) a set of principles for developing design activities.

Feedback from participants in the collaboration is based on post-surveys and semi-structured exit interviews conducted with the 2012 REU cohort, semi-structured exit interviews conducted with the 2013 REU cohort, and semi-structured interviews conducted with a random sample of the high school students in the 2013 Summer Program. For example, after the conclusion of the Summer 2012 program, several of the REU students reported that they felt a lack of engagement with the collaboration due to the overly-prescribed schedule, lack of the incorporation of their own ideas into the collaboration, and limited time to prepare. As a result, for the Summer 2013 program, we held a meeting about the collaboration and provided a schedule to the REU students at the start of their program that did not dictate how and what they should present to the high school students but made the expectation of the timeline clear so that the REU students had time to organize themselves. We also made the expectation clear that the REU students should focus on communicating their research to the high school students and discuss the social and historical impact of their work and its relation to diabetes. Otherwise, the choice of how to present their work was left up to the REU students. This lead to substantially increased engagement, evidenced by more positive feedback about the collaboration from the REU students in the 2013 cohort. Through surveys collected from both groups, we found that the lab shadowing and presentations made by the REU students about their research to the high school students were favored components of the collaboration. To capitalize on this interest from both sides, the lab shadowing day will be expanded to two days and occur earlier in the week, with high students rotating through many labs on the first day and partnering with a single REU student for the second day to better understand their research and to foster closer collaborations between the REU students and the high school students. The hoped-for result of these closer collaborations would mean that the REU students and high school students could then collaborate to communicate some aspect of the active research to either the high school students’ peers in the Summer Program or local middle school students. Finally, a recently-developed, soon-to-be-published set of five principles for engaging students in design activity will also guide our redesign of the program to help frame the focus of the program and design supporting activities so that the high school students and undergraduates are able to successfully collaborate to design activities for middle school students or other high school students. These principles will be included in the poster, along with illustrations of each principle through the newly-designed supporting activities for the collaborative program.

Anticipated Data Sets to be Gathered During Summer 2014 Post-surveys and semi-structured exit interviews are administered to the REU students every summer. To complement the data gathered from these sources, we will administer similar post-surveys and semi-structured exit interviews to the high school students. To examine whether our program has met our objectives, these semi-structured interviews and surveys will focus on three areas: (1) personal engagement with the collaborative program, (2) mentor-type relationships that emerge through the collaborative program, and (3) changes in interest in biomedical engineering as a result of the collaborative program. Anticipated Use of the Data Sets All data gathered will be used to redesign the collaboration further and to study mentor-type relationships that can develop between undergraduates and high school students and their effects on student engagement in STEM fields for subsequent years of the REU Program and Summer Program, which provide new samples of students every year. We do not intend to gather data from any population beyond the end of its respective program (for example, we do not anticipate that we will capture data about the Summer Program in the years that follow the Summer Program). As a result, long-term data on the effect of the collaborative program on career or educational goals will not be collected or analyzed.

Paper ID #10049

Works in Progress: Generating Interest in Biomedical Engineering throughExploration of the Design Process

Dr. Marcia A. Pool, University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign

At the time of this work, Marcia Pool was an Instructional Laboratory Coordinator in the Weldon Schoolof Biomedical Engineering at Purdue University; she is now a Lecturer at the University of Illinois atUrbana Champaign. At Purdue, she oversaw and assessed junior level laboratories, bioinstrumentationand biotransport, developed and implemented sophomore and junior professional development courses,and taught and mentored students in the Senior Design Capstone course. Marcia collaborated with Womenin Engineering in on-campus events to establish interest in biomedical engineering and continues to doso in her new position. She is also actively engaged at the local and national level with the biomedicalengineering honor society, AEMB.

Dr. Jennifer L. Groh, Purdue University Women in Engineering Program, West Lafayette

Dr. Groh joined the Purdue Women in Engineering Program (WIEP) in 2009. She received a B.S. inmicrobiology from Purdue University, and a Ph.D. in microbiology from the University of Oklahoma.Prior to joining WIEP, she was the Graduate Programs Coordinator in the Purdue Weldon School ofBiomedical Engineering. As Associate Director of WIEP, Dr. Groh administers the undergraduate Mentee& Mentor Program and the Graduate Mentoring Program, teaches the Women in Engineering seminar, andoversees WIEP’s K-12 outreach programming.

Dr. Allison L. Sieving, Purdue University, West Lafayette

Allison Sieving is the Laboratory and Assessment Coordinator for the Weldon School of Biomedical En-gineering at Purdue University. She received her B.S. in Biology from Bowling Green State University.She earned her M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the Basic Medical Sciences and Biomedical Engineeringprograms at Wayne State University, respectively. At Purdue, her work focuses on developing and im-plementing undergraduate laboratory and lecture courses that address the evolving needs of biomedicalengineers, creating outreach activities that build knowledge and appreciation of the field of biomedicalengineering, and managing the ABET assessment program for the Weldon School of Biomedical Engi-neering.

c©American Society for Engineering Education, 2014

Works in Progress: Generating Interest in Biomedical

Engineering through Exploration of the Design Process

Introduction

Increasing motivation of pre-college students in Science, Technology, Engineering, and

Mathematics (STEM) fields is a recurring goal, and there is a need to establish a pathway

through which the student interest in STEM is reinforced. To increase interest in biomedical

engineering (BME), we developed outreach modules which enabled students to explore and

build knowledge of the engineering design process by utilizing their problem solving skills.

The engineering design process is defined as an “[iterative], decision-making process in which

the basic sciences, mathematics, and the engineering sciences are applied to convert resources

optimally to meet these stated needs”1. When employed, the engineering design process is a

continuous cycle of improvement involving: problem identification, brainstorming, concept

generation, implementation, and verification of the design. These engineering design process

skills are not unlike decision making skills employed in real-life. However, describing

engineering to pre-college students in these foreign terms may be intimidating2

which may

inhibit students from pursuing engineering in college. Therefore, there is a need to advertise

engineering for what it is: implemented problem solving.

Engineers are natural problem solvers and seek challenge. Allowing novice engineers (pre-

college students) to practice and develop their problem solving skills through design allows them

to connect concept with implementation and verification thereby enhancing understanding and

interest while reducing apprehension to “engineering”. As students achieve success in small

design projects, their confidence is increased3 and their problem solving skills are further

cultivated. Many outreach projects are similar to cookbook laboratory exercises; these projects

may develop initial interest but once the problem is solved, interest may not remain. In contrast,

developing outreach modules around the engineering design process is similar to employing

problem-based learning in a classroom: active participation, concept understanding, and decision

making is required of students.

We developed three modules in which high school and middle school students participating in

Women in Engineering outreach experiences were able to gain an appreciation and interest in

BME by employing the engineering design process. These projects serve as an advertisement for

engineering as implemented problem solving.

Outreach program descriptions and activities

The Purdue University Women in Engineering Program (WIEP) is committed to increasing the

number of women studying engineering, and one approach is through outreach to pre-college

girls. For this project, hands-on, BME, problem solving activities were created for three different

outreach programs offered by WIEP: Introduce a Girl to Engineering Day (IGED), For Your

Imagination (FYI), and Exciting Discoveries for Girls in Engineering (EDGE). Complete details

(handouts, worksheets, etc.) of the activities can be found here:

https://engineering.purdue.edu/WIEP/AboutUs/WIEP_Publications

IGED is a one day, on-campus program held in conjunction with National Engineers’ Week

which introduces engineering concepts to 10th - 11th grade girls. Each participant attends three

hands-on engineering activities based on interests. For the BME activity, a ventricular assist

device (VAD) support system (concept generated from an altruistic project conducted by KCI,

Inc.) was developed and introduced participants to the use of VADs to sustain life for congestive

heart failure (CHF) patients. For this activity, the need to minimize patient discomfort due to

VAD pumps was introduced. Participants worked in groups to design a support device to relieve

pulling and shifting movements of the external VAD pumps. Participants were provided with a

model VAD device, and design constraints were introduced by limiting resources used to

construct the device. Teams documented brainstorming, concept generation, implementation, and

verification testing in a workbook. Finally, participants shared their design with the group,

emphasized strengths of the design, and identified areas for future design iteration.

FYI is a one-day, on-campus program held in summer for 7th - 9th grade girls who are at a

critical age for losing interest in STEM and for choosing important pre-college courses for

undergraduate STEM majors4. Participants rotate through three hands-on engineering activities.

For FYI, we selected an activity from TEACH Engineering in which participants design and

build a device capable of removing an object embedded in an ear canal5. Active learning was

encouraged following a brief introduction to the activity. Participants used the chalkboard to

share design ideas which allowed facilitators to quickly identify synergies and make immediate

corrections on misconceptions. In this activity, participants developed skills in and understanding

of brainstorming, design iteration, design constraints, and testing.

EDGE is a week-long residential camp for 10th - 11th grade girls. In groups, campers design and

build engineering-based projects and participate in experiments during laboratory tours.

Engineering is stressed as a profession where creativity and imagination are used to solve

problems for the benefit of society. For EDGE, we developed a three day (9 total contact hours)

mini-design project based on a BME capstone senior design project in which each team worked

to develop a “smart” gown which could replace traditional hospital gowns and measure

physiological signals (heart rate and respiration). Day 1 consisted of introducing participants to

BME, brainstorming ideas for obtaining signals and implementing into a gown (sketch

documented) and equipment overview. Day 2 involved building, design iteration, and

verification testing; it also included gown assembly and planning for a scientific style poster.

Day 3 began with an introduction to giving a professional presentation and continued with

developing the poster; the day concluded with participants presenting their posters and solutions

to their parents.

Preliminary results

At the end of each outreach program participants were asked to complete a short survey

evaluating the program and hands-on activities (Purdue University Institutional Review Board

approval: 1312014317). Written evaluations for each BME activity were analyzed for themes to

determine if participants enjoyed the design activity and identified elements of the design

process (e.g., brainstorming). Evaluations were grouped into two themes: (1) interesting activity

(non-design oriented comments) and (2) hands-on/design oriented comments. For instance,

“creating a device” and “how hands-on it was” were classified as “hands-on/design oriented”.

The percentage of respondents listed for each major theme was calculated. Total participants and

open comments for each activity were: VAD in IGED 2012 (75, 67), VAD in IGED 2013 (76,

51), object removal in FYI 2013 (94, 90), and “smart” gown in EDGE 2012 (64, 19).

Identification of the design process as “best part” of the experience was indicated in each

module: VAD (2012: 55 %, 2013: 39 %), object removal (70 %), and “smart” gown (26 %).

Contributing factors to variability include: program format, question delivery, comment rate,

participant age difference, and volunteer engagement with participants throughout activity.

Data from the IGED surveys further indicated that participants leave with a better understanding

of engineering (3.2 to 4.6 from pre- to post-event) and gain more confidence to choose

engineering as a career (3.1 to 3.8 from pre- to post-event) when using a Likert scale (1 – 5 with

1 being completely disagree and 5 being complete agree).

Additionally, anecdotal data from all programs support that hands-on design activities engage

student interest. Many participants stay in contact with activity mentors they meet during these

programs and are further influenced to keep engineering on the forefront of their choices for

college. Specifically, many parents and participants comment about a new interest in BME.

Summary and conclusions

Incorporating the design process into outreach activities increases participant’s self-exploration

of the problem and stimulates minds, thereby enhancing interest in engineering. Design process

activities can be developed from a variety of sources, including complex projects, if the project is

broken into and presented in terms of design process activities appropriate to age and skill level

of participants, in order to reduce participant anxiety to solve a complex problem. In each

outreach program, participants were able to actively practice and identify engineering activities

without hesitance; this achievement provides participants a foundation of success on which

future experiences can build to increase overall participant confidence in engineering abilities.

Finally, comments indicated design process elements were important to participant enjoyment of

the activity.

References

[1] ABET. (2013, October 17). Criteria for Accrediting Engineering Programs, 2013 – 2014 [Online].

http://www.abet.org/DisplayTemplates/DocsHandbook.aspx?id=3149

[2] E. Rushton et al., “Infusing Engineering into Public Schools” in Proceedings of the 2002 American Society for

Engineering Education Annual Conference & Exposition, 2002 © American Society for Engineering Education

[3] A. Bandura. Self-Efficacy: The Exercise of Control. New York: W.H. Freeman, 1997.

[4] “The Condition of Education.” United States Department of Education: National Center for Education Statistics.

Washington, D.C.: U. S. Government Printing Office, 2006.

[5] S. Peirce-Cottler et al. (2007). “Designing a Medical Device to Extract Foreign Bodies from the Ear”. [Online].

Available: http://www.teachengineering.org/view_activity.php?url=collection/uva_/activities/uva_eardevice_act/

uva_eardevice_act.xml

Acknowledgement: The “smart” gown activity in EDGE was funded in part by NIH R25EB013029-02.

Paper ID #9100

Works in Progress: Impact of First-Year Micro-/Nano-Technology ResearchProject Course on Future Research and Graduate/Professional School In-volvement

Martin T. Spang, Ohio State University

Martin T. Spang will be pursuing a PhD in Biomedical Engineering this Fall. He recently received hisBS in Biomedical Engineering with Honors Research Distinction and a minor in Entrepreneurship fromThe Ohio State University. He has three years of teaching experience from Ohio State’s Fundamentals ofEngineering for Honors program and has assisted in the design of a creativity and innovation seminar andthe semester conversion of a first-year nanotechnology and microfluidics project course. He is highly in-volved with Biomedical Engineering Society, growing Ohio State’s student chapter to over 150 membersand establishing a nationally recognized mentoring program. His research interests include ocular biome-chanics, nanotechnology, tissue engineering, technology commercialization, and engineering educationand leadership.

Aaron Strickland Strickland

Aaron Strickland is a fourth-year Chemical Engineering undergraduate student at The Ohio State Univer-sity. He has worked with the first-year engineering program for honors students for the three years sincecompleting the program as a first-year student. He has completed internship experiences in both R&Dand manufacturing roles, and continues as a curriculum development lead for the micro/nanotechnologyproject option for students in their second semester. He will be going into industry after the completionof his undergraduate program.

Dr. Deborah M. Grzybowski, Ohio State University

Dr. Grzybowski is a Professor of Practice in the Engineering Education Innovation Center and the Depart-ment of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at The Ohio State University. She received her Ph.D.in Biomedical Engineering and her B.S. and M.S. in Chemical Engineering from The Ohio State Uni-versity. Prior to becoming focused on engineering education, her research interests included regulationof intracranial pressure and transport across the blood-brain barrier in addition to various ocular-cellularresponses to fluid forces and the resulting implications in ocular pathologies.

c©American Society for Engineering Education, 2014

Works in Progress: Impact of First-Year Micro-/Nano-Technology Research Project Course on Future Research and

Graduate/Professional School Involvement

Introduction The first-year engineering program at The Ohio State University provides honors students with the option to undertake a research and development design project with a focus on lab-on-a-chip (LOC) and nanotechnology applications. This project is an alternative to a robot design-build course which has a focus on mechanical engineering and computer programming1. This paper will ask the evidence-based practice question: “Does a research and development design project course influence a student’s decision to become involved in future research projects and pursue higher education in the form of graduate and professional school?” We hypothesize that a significantly greater percentage of the research project course alumni will be involved in various research roles and activities and pursue higher education as compared to the alumni from the robot design course. To measure future research involvement, alumni who have completed the first-year engineering honors program within the past four years have been surveyed. As LOCs and nanotechnology have many applications in medicine, many students that enroll in this course are biomedical engineering and chemical and biomolecular engineering majors. This rigorous research and development project course provides students with an understanding of the research process and develops the necessary skill sets and interest that encourage involvement in research as an undergraduate and promotes consideration of higher education. This may be in part explained by the students’ initial interest in research as demonstrated by enrolling in a research project course (which will be controlled for), as well as by the skill sets developed while taking the research project course. Students participate in research for a variety of reasons, including the desire to become a scientist or to clarify, confirm, or refine their educational and career goals2. At The Ohio State University, participation in research is approximately 22.4% for undergraduate students3. According to the 2012 US Census, 18.6% of students are continuing education in graduate schools4. STEM graduate programs in the US have enrollments between 40%-70%+ international students5. This research course may train a generation of domestic students to attend graduate school and reduce many universities’ dependence on international applicants. This study was conducted under IRB exempt protocol # 2013E0570 in accordance with the Office of Responsible Research Practices.

Study Population Participants in this study have all completed the introductory honors engineering, Fundamentals of Engineering for Honors (FEH), track at The Ohio State University. This track is open to first-year students that have demonstrated academic achievement in high school and have been given “honors” status by the university. The first semester (Autumn) introduces students to problem-solving, working in groups, and two programming languages: C++ and MATLAB. The second semester (Spring) introduces students to drawing, 3D modeling, and a 10-week design project. There are two options for the design project: a robot design-build course and an alternative nanotechnology (nano) research course. The study has included students who have completed the honors engineering sequence in the past four years. Approximately 1500 students have completed the sequence over the past four years, and the distribution by course and year can be viewed in Table 1 below.

Table 1: Distribution of student participants by course and year Year Robot Nano Total 2010 307 39 346 2011 277 47 324 2012 293 61 354 2013 342 103 445 Total 1219 250 1469

Course Structures This class prepares students for research by developing necessary skills in several key areas. Students are exposed to the full methodology of research design, including the development, manufacturing, and testing of an LOC device. The course culminates with a judged poster forum and technical slideshow presentation of the students’ research and results. In contrast, the students who take the robot design-build course are instructed in various aspects of mechanical design, which includes drive trains, motor performance, statics, and strength of materials. The objective is to create an autonomous robot which students program to complete specific tasks on a competition course. Both course options have students participate in groups of three or four. Both options have recently switched to an inverted classroom pedagogical model in which the content remains the same, but each instructional day is divided into two parts: preparation and application6-8. The preparation is directed at the lower Bloom’s Taxonomy levels, and the application targets the upper Bloom’s Taxonomy levels9. Table 2 below shows the components and timing of a typical inverted class day schedule. Before class, students are first introduced to the material and are evaluated. In class, this material is reviewed through a brief lecture and reinforced through guided activities and assignments. After class, assignments are completed and students prepare for the next class.

Table 2: Typical Inverted Class Day Schedule Before Class In Class After Class • Preparation activity: Reading,

video, tutorial, or problem(s) • Evaluation: online quiz or turned

in solution

• Short lecture • Activities • Application assignments or lab

• Finish application assignments, open lab

• Prepare for next class

The course consists of five major components, including experimental microfluidics, nanotechnology research, group presentations of nanotechnology topics, a poster presentation, and an oral presentation, which comprise approximately 50%, 20%, 10%, 10%, and 10% of the course project grade, respectively. The poster and oral presentations are part of a final competition that judges students based on research quality and presentation skills. A. Experimental Microfluidics

In this component, teams design, build, and implement a Lab-on-a-chip device to test a hypothesis regarding cell attachment to surfaces examining variables similar to the experiments conducted by Mercier-Bonin et al10. The semester long design/build/research project offers teams working knowledge of biomedical devices based on nanotechnology, microfluidics, and microscale engineering. Along with the hands-on activities at the microscale, various reading modules and lab tours introduce the techniques necessary to develop technology at the micro- and nanoscale. The challenge of this project is to produce a design for the experimental device, manufacture that design in a biocompatible material, and study the effect of surface topology on cell attachment. Additionally, computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software is then introduced both as a tool for educational purposes (allowing the students to visualize the flow properties described in other materials) and as a method to analyze their devices. They later use the software to perform sensitivity analyses of microfluidic channel dimensions and to characterize the flow in their own custom-designed microfluidic chip, which allows them to interpret the results of their experiments on cell adhesion. The students are given project objectives, general device requirements, specific on-chip requirements, and validation protocols to guide experimental design throughout the semester. B. Lab-on-a-Chip Extensions and Nanotechnology Research

In tandem with the development of a microfluidic chip for research on cell attachment, the teams are also tasked with designing a device capable of detecting a disease from a blood sample. This project must be able to capture and detect a specific analyte of interest from a collected blood sample. This analyte must be found in the blood and indicative of a specific disease state (inflammation, heart disease, cancer, HIV, etc.). Well-defined micro- and nanoscale channels can provide better understanding of fundamental fluid transport at the dimensions relevant to bacteria, viruses, proteins, DNA, and other nanoscale analytes. The ability to understand and manipulate materials at this size scale is valuable for chemical and biological applications. Another challenge lies in the specific detection of these analytes, and a number of strategies have been developed harnessing various physical phenomena (e.g. fluorescence, magnetic properties, electric fields, enzymatic reactions, etc.) to provide means of analyte detection. The students must choose an appropriate medical application for their chip such as the devices discussed above, and design a device that incorporates imposed constraints to make a useful, clinically relevant tool. Additionally, students are given ideal characteristics, required features, required constraints, and specific tasks to guide their design. Students also conduct a technical literature review towards the beginning of the semester to develop familiarity with literature search tools and strategies.

C. Cool Nano Topic of the Day (CNTOTD) Group Presentations

The Cool Nano Topic of the Day (CNTOTD) is a semi-casual presentation given by each team two times throughout the course. This prepares students for formal presentations of technical information. The goal is a brief (approximately 10 minutes), informative presentation about any area of nanotechnology that the team finds interesting, would like to learn more about, and share with the class. Typically the presentations are done using PowerPoint. Students are encouraged to choose topics that emphasize material related to the course. The goal is to make the topic as specific as possible and explain it with as much depth as possible. Narrowly defined topics with a deep understanding of the details are preferred over broad topics with limited depth. D. Microfluidics Poster Presentation

Students design a poster for a formal presentation on the microfluidic experiments described above. These posters are then printed and supplied for a final competition. The poster serves as a visual aid for a brief presentation given by all group members to judges. Students are given access to guidelines, a template, an outline, and samples as a starting point for creating their posters. Students are typically judged three times. Judges come primarily from academia, including faculty, graduate students, and undergraduate alumni of the course; students are guaranteed one judge from each category. As seen in Figure 1 below, the environment is similar to a poster session at a technical conference.

Figure 1: Microfluidics poster competition

E. Nanotechnology Oral Presentation

The nanotechnology oral presentation allows the groups to explain and justify their proposed nanotechnology design. This is a formal technical presentation that is judged by faculty and staff. Students are encouraged to present their design in a way that would convince investors to fund their project. Students are required to include the following sections: background/medical application, preliminary concepts, design process, final design explanation, and future research. Additionally, students create and present a complete working drawing set of their nanotechnology device in SolidWorks. Presentations conclude with a question and answer period. A strict time constraint is enforced, and presentations are expected to be professional and well-rehearsed. Approach It is believed that alumni of the nanotechnology course will have increased involvement in research and intentions of attending graduate/professional school. To measure future research involvement, alumni who have completed the first-year engineering honors program within the past four years were surveyed to quantify their involvement in various research roles and activities, including undergraduate research, presentations at technical forums and conferences, research and development internships, as well as planned participation in graduate or professional school. The survey consists of a variety of multiple choice, check boxes, and optional short answers. The survey was combined with another study and was sent out via a survey link email. The survey was created and results were stored in Qualtrics Survey Software (qualtrics.com). Aggregate information was used to protect the privacy of participants in the study. In addition to consent, major, course and year completed, the questions below in Table 3 were asked regarding the hypothesis.

Table 3: Survey questions and answer choices Questions Answer Choices 1. PRIOR to taking ENGR 193/1282, did you plan to conduct any type of research during your undergraduate career? This may include research lab positions, research-oriented design teams, undergraduate thesis, or research-oriented co-ops or internships.

Yes

No

2. SINCE taking ENGR 193/1282, have you conducted any type of research outside of coursework? This may include research lab positions, research-oriented design teams, undergraduate thesis, or research-oriented co-ops or internships.

Yes

No

3. [If ‘No’ to question 2] Do you plan to conduct research in the future? Again, this may include research lab positions, research-oriented design teams, undergraduate thesis, or research-oriented co-ops or internships.

Yes

No

4. In which kinds of research have you participated?

I have no research experience Undergraduate research Research-oriented design team Research-oriented internship/co-op Undergraduate thesis Technical forum/conference presentation Other (please specify)

5. [If any answer besides ‘I have no experience with research’ to question 4] Please indicate your level of agreement with the following statement, “My experience in my ENGR 193/1282 project course helped me decide to get involved with research.”

Strongly Disagree Disagree Neutral Agree Strongly Agree

6. PRIOR to taking ENGR 193/1282, did you plan to attend graduate or professional school?

Yes No

7. SINCE taking ENGR 193/1282, do you plan to attend graduate or professional school?

Yes No

Results The survey was sent via email through Qualtrics with a link to the survey to all alumni of the honors engineering program from 2010 through 2013. A summary of the numbers from each year is shown in Table 4. Based on Tables 1 and 4, the overall response rate was 24.23%, while individual response rates from Robot and Nano were 24.12% and 24.80%, respectively.

Table 4: Year and course option cross table Which option did you take? Robot Nano Total

When did you take the course?

Spring 2013 86 25 111 Spring 2012 78 17 95 Spring 2011 60 12 72 Spring 2010 70 8 78

Total 294 62 356

The course options were cross-tabulated to create Tables 5-8 below. Percentages were used for comparative purposes, but totals are indicated above. Statistical values were calculated using a Chi-squared test in Minitab, and can be viewed in Table 9 below.

Table 5: Questions 1-3

PRIOR to taking ENGR 193/1282, did you plan to conduct any type of research during your undergraduate career?

SINCE taking ENGR 193/1282, have you conducted any type of research outside of coursework?

Do you plan to conduct research in the future?

Course Option Yes No Yes No Yes No Robot 32.08% 67.92% 36.86% 63.14% 33.15% 66.85% Nano 66.13% 33.87% 50.82% 49.18% 70.00% 30.00% Overall 38.03% 61.97% 39.27% 60.73% 38.32% 61.68%

Table 6: Question 4

In which kinds of research have you participated?

Course Option

I have no exp. with research

Undergrad research

Research-oriented

design team

Research-oriented

internship/co-op

Undergrad thesis

Technical forum/conf. presentation

Other (please

specify): Robot 59.49% 26.28% 9.49% 19.34% 8.39% 5.84% 4.38% Nano 40.68% 47.46% 13.56% 15.25% 8.47% 10.17% 5.08% Overall 56.16% 30.03% 10.21% 18.62% 8.41% 6.61% 4.50%

Table 7: Question 5

Please indicate your level of agreement with the following statement, “My experience in my ENGR 193/1282 project course helped me decide to get involved with research.”

Course Option

Strongly Disagree Disagree Neutral Agree

Strongly Agree

Robot 11.83% 29.59% 40.83% 17.16% 0.59% Nano 0.00% 7.69% 40.38% 44.23% 7.69% Overall 9.05% 24.43% 40.72% 23.53% 2.26%

Table 8: Questions 6-7

PRIOR to taking ENGR 193/1282, did you plan to attend graduate or professional school?

SINCE taking ENGR 193/1282, do you plan to attend graduate or professional school?

Course Option Yes No Yes No Robot 45.89% 54.11% 58.56% 41.44% Nano 66.13% 33.87% 75.81% 24.19% Overall 49.44% 50.56% 61.58% 38.42%

Table 9: Statistical values

Question Q 1 Q 2 Q 3 Q 4 Q 5 Q 6 Q 7 p-value 0.000 0.042 0.000 0.055 0.000 0.004 0.0011 Discussion As seen in Table 5 (Questions 1-3), a greater percentage of students who have completed the Nano option are interested in conducting research before taking the course, conduct research after taking the course, and intend on conducting research after taking the course. As seen in Table 6, Nano alumni have the most experience with research, specifically undergraduate research, with the exception of research-oriented internships and co-ops. This may be explained as students interested in research tend to conduct research at universities as compared to interning between semesters. Table 7 (Question 5) most directly relates to the hypothesis, in which students attribute their involvement in research to their first-year engineering experience. Over 50% of students who completed the nanotechnology option either ‘Agree’ or ‘Strongly Agree’ and less than 50% are ‘Neutral’ or ‘Disagree’ that their experience helped them decide to get involved with research. This is contrary to over 40% either stating ‘Disagree’ or ‘Strongly Disagree’ that their experience in Robot helped them decide to get involved with research. Table 8 (Questions 6 & 7) shows that the Nano option has the highest intended involvement in graduate and professional school both before and after taking the course. Both course options have an increase in intention to attend graduate/professional school. Table 9 indicates statistical significance for all questions (significance set at α = 0.05), with the exception of Question 4. The p-value indicates the probability that the two sample populations, Robot and Nano, would produce the same distribution of answers. The lack of significance for Question 4 can be partly be explained by the limited sample size of Nano alumni (62 students), as some choices had less than 5 expected responses (approx. 8% for Nano), and this limits the power of the Chi-squared test. This class offers an alternative that meets the needs of students interested in research. The results of Question 1 suggest that students take the nanotechnology option because it better aligns with their interests; Question 3 suggests that they complete the class maintaining that interest, and Question 5 suggests that the class contributes to that continued interest.

Future Directions The course has recently implemented the inverted classroom model. The course was successfully conducted last spring and will continue to be updated every year through the collaboration of faculty and staff of teaching assistants. For future years, the microfluidics portion will increase the freedom to test variables in the lab component, placing more emphasis on the experimental design. This will add variety to the poster competition and allow students to conduct and design more unique experiments. This data has justified the motivations of this course, which trains a new generation of STEM researchers. Additionally, this course has positively influenced students’ motivation to become involved with future research as an undergraduate and beyond. Research is necessary for the development of STEM fields, and it starts with education. This addresses the need for domestic students to continue education and support graduate and professional programs in the US. References [1] James Beams, Jeffrey Radigan, Prabal Dutta, Theodore Pavlic, John Demel, Richard Freuler, Erik Justen, Michael Hoffmann, “Experiences With A Comprehensive Freshman Hands On Course Designing, Building, And Testing Small Autonomous Robots.” Proceedings of the 2003 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference & Exposition, Session Title: Teaching Design through Projects. [2] A. Hunter, S. L. Laursen, E. Seymour, “Becoming a scientist: the role of undergraduate research in students’ cognitive, personal, and professional development.” Wiley InterScience, Oct 2006. DOI: 10.1002/sce.20173 [3] Undergraduate Research Office of The Ohio State University. 2012 Annual Report. Available at undergraduateresearchoffice.osu.edu/about/2012AnnualReport.pdf (accessed 1/2/2014). [4] United States Census Bureau, School Enrollment, CPS October 2012 – Detailed Tables, Table 5: Type of College and Year Enrolled for College Students 15 Years Old and Over, by Age, Sex, Race, Attendance Status, Control of School, and Enrollment Status: October 2012. [5] National Science Foundation, Survey of Graduate Students and Postdoctorate, webcaspar.nsf.gov. (accessed 1/2/2014). [6] M. Lage, G. Platt, and M. Treglia, “Inverting the Classroom: A Gateway to Creating an Inclusive Learning Environment.” Journal of Economic Education, Vol. 31, No. 1, pp. 30 – 43, Winter 2000. [7] J. Strayer, “How learning in an inverted classroom influences cooperation, innovation and task orientation.” Learning Environ Res., Vol. 15, pp. 171–193, July 2012. [8] J. W. Baker, "The ‘classroom flip’: Using web course management tools to become a guide by the side," presented at the 11th International Conference on College Teaching and Learning, Jacksonville, FL, 2000. [9] L. W. Anderson, D. R. Krathwohl, and B. S. Bloom, “A taxonomy for learning, teaching, and assessing.” Longman, 2005. [10] M. Mercier-Bonin, K. Ouazzani, P. Schmitz, and S. Lorthois, “Study of bioadhesion on a flat plate with a yeast/glass model system.” Journal of Colloid and Interface Science 271 (2004) 342-350.