Fostering Integrative Problem Solving in Biomedical Engineering: The PBL Approach

The rapidly changing field of Biomedical Engineeringposes particular challenges for engineering education. Onthe educator front, medical technology changes at such arapid pace that it is hard is for BME educators to keepabreast of all the advancements in the related fields ofmolecular biology, computer science, tissue engineering,andgeneticengineering.Further,sincetextbooksforunder-graduate BME courses are few and far between, instructorseither have to patch together course material from multiplesources or use textbooks from related fields which ofteninvolves skipping over a great deal of irrelevant material.On the student front, the learning challenges are im-mense. The field demands that students develop multi-disciplinary skills and knowledge in biology, chemistry,several engineering subdisciplines and computer science.They need the modeling and quantitative skills of tra-ditional engineers, but also the qualitative systems un-derstanding representative of a more biological approach.They also need exposure to the clinical side of the dis-cipline where design applications meet the real world ofpatients and doctors. In short, students need to be fullyconversant in three intellectual traditions, which are oftenat odds with one another and have historically been taughtby distinct faculties. For an individual to reconcile thesedisparate practices and historically separated intellectualtraditions she/he will need cognitive flexibility and true in-tegrative thinking—appropriate learning goals for a BMEcurriculum.In an attempt to foster such integrative thinking andinterdisciplinary problem solving strategies, certain BMEprograms