Engineering in Healthcare: A Heart Lung System

Abstract

INSPIRES is an interactive curriculum designed for high school students with the goal of INcreasing Student Participation, Interest, and Recruitment in Engineering & Science. It was created to target the ITEA Standards for Technological Literacy and to increase involvement in STEM related fields. This curriculum allows for students to learn basic engineering design principles through a variety of ways including hands-on activities, online animations and simulations and culminates in an open ended design challenge that encourages creativity, resourcefulness and teamwork to solve a real world engineering problem. A new curriculum module was created this year entitled: "Engineering in Healthcare: A Heart Lung System Case Study". Like all of the INSPIRES curricula, it focuses on teaching students basic engineering principles while introducing them to the engineering design and decision making process. The students are introduced to the curriculum by watching a professionally produced video about Tynisha, a 13 year old girl who was born with a heart defect which required lifesaving open heart surgery to repair. Also, they are introduced to the medical team and the device that kept her alive during open heart surgery, the heart-lung machine. The students then go through a series of hands on activities, online content, animations and simulations where they learn about the factors that affect the heart lung machine. The students then build and test a heart lung system, which circulates and cools the blood of the "patient", and then evaluate the effectiveness of their prototype. Over the first five years of the INSPIRES project, the teacher Professional Development (PD) training was limited to two days. But in the past two years, with the support of a NSFDRK- 12 grant and cooperation with the education department, the PD training was extended to three weeks. This has allowed the teachers to spend more time to learn, practice and reflect. The PD is split into three distinct sessions. The morning session focused on the heart lung engineering content taught by engineering faculty and inquiry-based pedagogical facilitators (one of which is a faculty member in the education department). The early afternoon sessions had the teachers apply what they learned in the morning by teaching the heart lung curriculum to classrooms of students enrolled in the Upward Bound Program. In the late afternoon session, the teachers and INSPIRES faculty collectively reviewed videotapes of that day?s session and provided constructive criticism to improve content understanding, teaching pedagogy and curriculum delivery. Of the twelve teachers who participated in the three week PD training, nine have/are implementing the "Engineering in Health Care: A Heart Lung Case Study" curriculum with their high school students during the 2010-11 academic year. To date, student learning data has been collected and analyzed and are presented here (for seven of the nine teacher classrooms) to determine the effectiveness of the curriculum. Statistically significant results in both engineering and science content have been demonstrated; as well as statistically significant improvements in interest and attitude and which curriculum features were most beneficial. © 2011 American Society for Engineering Education.