Prototyping a transdisciplinary bioengineering curriculum development project

Building students’ capabilities to integrate complex concepts across transdisciplinary boundaries of related but distinct theoretical courses is critical to real-world problem solving and creative design solutions (Burnett, 2011). In the context of bioengineering, students must be able to draw on knowledge from several scientific and mathematical domains and integrate them in innovative ways to tackle complex biomedical problems. In traditional degree structures, these domains are typically sequestered into distinct subjects, with minimal cross-curricular references beyond the acknowledgement of any chains of prerequisite knowledge. This has had the unintended effect of students over-compartmentalising concepts: they are often unable to appreciate how different ideas fit together synergistically to form a coherent and more complex whole. To address this problem, we initiated a curriculum design project exploring the development of an integrative and collaborative student project that authentically links four theoretical foundations of bioengineering across multiple years of a degree program: programming and systems modelling concepts, human anatomy and biomechanics, electronics, and engineering design. A design-based research (DBR) methodology was applied to establish a curriculum design team encompassing academic lecturers, educational technology researchers, and technology designers. Our curriculum design process follows a four-stage iterative model comprising of: problem analysis and identification of initial design principles, prototyping curriculum design solutions, evaluation and redesign, followed by refinement and sharing of the design principles. The current iteration of the curriculum development project involves a 3D-printed programmable robotic arm and a series of constructively aligned workshop activities and assessments, and there are plans to establish a common learner-centric ecology of resources (Luckin, 2008) for student collaborative projects acro