Fostering the Entrepreneurial Mindset Through the Development of Multidisciplinary Learning Modules Based on the "Quantified Self" Social Movement

Traditional engineering curriculum and coursework lacks entrepreneurial experiences for students. While most entrepreneurship program models utilize curriculum that is delivered in a business school collaboration, more recently engineering colleges have started promoting the idea that Entrepreneurial-Minded Learning (EML) can be formalized within engineering education. Development of an entrepreneurial mindset is difficult while students are actively working on their senior projects, so additional experiential learning during the earlier levels of undergraduate education is needed. In this project, we set out to include EML in courses across engineering programs and at various levels of the ‘core’ curriculum. EML modules were based on the theme of “Quantified Self” (QS). This is a new, exciting, real-world entrepreneurship opportunity that uses wearable sensor technology to help people understand their personal health and wellness. The goal of this project was to develop teaching resources that used the QS theme to motivate EML in a variety of academic topics. During the first phase of this project QS modules were developed and implemented in four biomedical engineering (BME) courses at the freshman, sophomore, junior and senior levels. Direct and indirect assessment was used to gauge the effectiveness of modules at changing students’ perceptions and improving their entrepreneurial capabilities. Then, these resources were shared with faculty from four additional disciplines at three different institutions to develop and implement additional EML modules across a broad range of engineering and science topics. The EML modules were multi-week assignments that were organized following Problem Based Learning (PBL) pedagogical techniques. Each module combined several open-ended tasks that built sequentially following previously completed work and the topics that were covered in class. EML is an effective vehicle for including inductive learning pedagogies into technical engineering courses. Correspondingly, the QS theme provides real world motivation for students to engage with many technical topics. By spreading modules into a variety of different ‘core’ courses, students will be repeatedly exposed to each of the targeted entrepreneurship skills with an increasing levels of difficulty and expectations. These opportunity and impact recognition skills are an important prerequisite for students during their senior capstone projects.