TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Sensors and Scatterplots
Students explore the use of several biomedical engineering sensor devices, and then use the collected data to create and analyze scatterplots of the different variables to determine if any relationships exist between the measured...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Glowing Flowers
Student teams learn about engineering design of green fluorescent proteins (GFPs) and their use in medical research, including stem cell research. They simulate the use of GFPs by adding fluorescent dye to water and letting a flower or...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Watch Out for the Blind Spots
In this service-learning engineering project, students follow the steps of the engineering design process to design a hearing testing device. More specifically, they design a prototype machine that can be used to test the peripheral...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Challenges of Laparoscopic Surgery
Students teams use a laparoscopic surgical trainer to perform simple laparoscopic surgery tasks (dissections, sutures) using laparoscopic tools. Just like in the operating room, where the purpose is to perform surgery carefully and...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Creepy Silly Putty
Students learn about viscoelastic material behavior, such as strain rate dependence and creep, by using silly putty, an easy-to-make polymer material. They learn how to make silly putty, observe its behavior with different strain rates,...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Preconditioning Balloons
Students use balloons (a polymer) to explore preconditioning a viscoelastic material behavior that is important to understand when designing biomedical devices. They improve their understanding of preconditioning by measuring the force...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Curb the Epidemic!
Using a website simulation tool, students build on their understanding of random processes on networks to interact with the graph of a social network of individuals and simulate the spread of a disease. They decide which two individuals...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Dna Forensics and Color Pigments
Students perform DNA forensics using food coloring to enhance their understanding of DNA fingerprinting, restriction enzymes, genotyping and DNA gel electrophoresis. They place small drops of different food coloring ("water-based paint")...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Applying Hooke's Law to Cancer Detection
Students explore Hooke's law while working in small groups at their lab benches. They collect displacement data for springs with unknown spring constants, k, by adding various masses of known weight. After exploring Hooke's law and...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Pill Dissolving Demo
In a class demonstration, the teacher places different pill types ("chalk" pill, gel pill, and gel tablet) into separate glass beakers of vinegar, representing human stomach acid. After 20-30 minutes, the pills dissolve. Students observe...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: The Mighty Heart
Students learn about the form and function of the human heart through the dissection of sheep hearts. They learn about the different parts of the heart and are able to identify the anatomical structures and compare them to the all of the...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Active and Passive Transport: Red Rover Send Particles Over
Students compare and contrast passive and active transport by playing a game to model this phenomenon. Movement through cell membranes is also modeled, as well as the structure and movement typical of the fluid mosaic model of the cell...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Induced Emf in a Coil of Wire
Students use a simple set up consisting of a coil of wire and a magnet to visualize induced EMF. First, students move a coil of wire near a magnet and observe the voltage that results. They then experiment with moving the wire, magnet,...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: What Is Going on With Grandma?
Students are introduced to the concepts of the challenge question. First independently, and then in small groups, they generate ideas for solving the grand challenge introduced in the associated lesson: Your grandmother has a fractured...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: What Makes Our Bones Strong?
Students will use this activity to determine what keeps our bones strong. Soaking the bones in vinegar will remove the calcium from the bones causing them to become soft and rubbery. Students will find that when we age, calcium is...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Surgical Device Engineering
This unit focuses on teaching students about the many aspects of biomedical engineering (BME). Students will see that it is a broad field that relies on concepts from each of the other disciplines of engineering. They will also begin to...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Engineering Nature: Dna Visualization and Manipulation
Students are introduced to genetic techniques such as DNA electrophoresis and imaging technologies used for molecular and DNA structure visualization. In the field of molecular biology and genetics, biomedical engineering plays an...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Nano Tech: Insights Into a Nano Sized World
Through two lessons and four activities, students learn about nanotechnology, its extreme smallness, and its vast and growing applications in our world. Embedded within the unit is a broader introduction to the field of material science...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Aging Heart Valves
In this unit, students learn about the form and function of the human heart through lecture, research and dissection. Following the steps of the Legacy Cycle, students brainstorm, research, design and present viable solutions to various...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Understanding the Structure of the Eye
Students learn about the anatomical structure of the human eye and how humans see light, as well as some causes of color blindness. They conduct experiments as an example of research to gather information. During their investigations,...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Engineering Bones
Middle schoolers extend their knowledge of the skeletal system to biomedical engineering design, specifically the concept of artificial limbs. Students relate the skeleton as a structural system, focusing on the leg as structural...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Muscles, Oh My!
Students are introduced to how engineering closely relates to the field of biomechanics and how the muscular system produces human movement. They learn the importance of the muscular system in our daily lives, why it is important to be...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Bone Fractures and Engineering
Students learn about the role engineers and engineering play in repairing severe bone fractures. They acquire knowledge about the design and development of implant rods, pins, plates, screws and bone grafts. They learn about materials...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: The Cloning of Cells
Learners continue their education on cells in the human body. They discuss stem cells and how engineers are involved in the research of stem cell behavior. They learn about possible applications of stem cell research and associated...