Students learn the function of the liver and how biomedical engineers can use liver regeneration to help people. Students test the effects of chemical toxins on a beef liver and how salt changes the liver's ability to break down these...

Students learn how forces affect the human skeletal system through fractures, and why certain bones are more likely to break than others depending on their design and use in the body. They learn how engineers and doctors collaborate to...

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...

In this project, students are challenged to answer the question "Is there a way to detect the presence of tumors that isn't as painful as mammography but more reliable and quantifiable than a breast-self exam or clinical breast-exams?"....

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...

Student teams create laparoscopic surgical robots designed to reduce the invasiveness of diagnosing endometriosis and investigate how the disease forms and spreads. Using a synthetic abdominal cavity simulator, students test and iterate...

Through this unit, students act as engineers who are given the challenge to design laparoscopic surgical tools. After learning about human anatomy and physiology of the abdominopelvic cavity, especially as it applies to laparoscopic...

Young scholars reflect on their experiences making silly putty (the previous hands-on activity in the unit), especially why changing the borax concentration alters the mechanical properties of silly putty and how this pertains to tissue...

The Engineering and the Human Body unit covers the broad spectrum of topics that make up our very amazing human body. Students are introduced to the space environment and learn the major differences between the environment on Earth and...

Students are presented with a challenge question concerning color blindness and asked to use engineering principles to design devices to help people who are color blind. Using the legacy cycle as a model, this unit is comprised of five...

Young scholars 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...

For students interested in studying biomechanical engineering, especially in the field of surgery, this lesson serves as an anatomy and physiology primer of the abdominopelvic cavity. Students are introduced to the abdominopelvic...

Students design and build prototypes for protective eyewear. They choose different activities or sports that require protective eyewear and design a device for that particular use. Students learn about the many ways in which the eyes can...

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...

A main concern of shoe engineers is creating shoes that provide the right amount of arch support to prevent (or fix) common gait misalignments that lead to injury. During this activity, students look at their own footprints and determine...

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...

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...

Students are introduced to the concept of viscoelasticity and some of the material behaviors of viscoelastic materials, including strain rate dependence, stress relaxation, creep, hysteresis and preconditioning. Viscoelastic material...

Student teams build model hand dynamometers used to measure grip strengths of people recovering from sports injuries. They use their models to measure how much force their classmates muscles are capable of producing, and analyze the data...

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...

All of us have felt sick at some point in our lives. Many times, we find ourselves asking, "What is the quickest way that I can start to feel better?" During this two-lesson unit, students study that question and determine which form of...

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...

Through two lessons and five activities, students explore the structure and function of cell membranes. Specific transport functions, including active and passive transport, are presented. In the legacy cycle tradition, students are...

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,...