Design for Community Wellness: A Community-Engaged Learning Experience for BME Undergraduate Students

Purpose Community-engaged learning (CEL) has been incorporated into engineering curricula to provide students with authentic design challenges and opportunities to develop professional skills for career-preparedness. This innovation paper describes a novel implementation of CEL in a biomedical engineering (BME) design elective, titled Design for Community Wellness, for undergraduate students. Methods Student teams were partnered with community-based organizations (CBO) to address a community-identified, wellness-focused priority using the human-centered design (HCD) cycle. Surveys with Likert-type questions were used at pre- and post-time points to assess student confidence with engineering skills, course learning objectives, perceived ability to help community with BME, and previously validated metrics of engineering identity, empathy, and engineering self-efficacy. Open response questions were used to further analyze the perceived impact of the course. A survey was also deployed to CBOs to assess the benefits for community members. Results All teams were successful in delivering usable prototypes for their community partners. Student and community partner surveys indicated high satisfaction with the class. No statistical differences were found in any quantitative metrics from pre- and post-surveys, except for a significant increase in confidence hosting user focus groups or interviews. Conclusions In the future, this course will be co-taught with an instructor from the humanities to better prepare students for interactions with community members and to analyze social context for their design projects. Additionally, teams will be multi-disciplinary with engineering and humanities students. Furthermore, alternative strategies will be explored to better assess the impact of this experiment on student development.