A New Approach to Learning Basic Medical Device Design Through Challenge-Based and Experiential Learning

One of the biggest challenges of Higher Education is to train professionals prepared to join the workforce in a dynamic world, that can adapt rapidly to change and can acquire new knowledge and skills by themselves in this journey of lifelong learning. Our university recently implemented a New Educational Model having Challenge-Based Learning as one of its main pillars. The university collaborates with Educational Partners, which are companies, institutions or persons that open their doors to bring the students to a real-life environment to work on real challenges. This study shows a particular course of the fourth semester of the Biomedical Engineering curricula, that includes as its challenge to design a medical device from the ground up. The course was implemented in four different groups, with a slight twist in the allocated time to the theoretic modules and the challenge project, to study and determine the best theoretic/practice balance ratio. The course deliverables were analyzed to observe any significant differences in the students' progress and achievements along the course. A student perception survey was applied to understand the experiential learning involvement from their perspective. The results show that the shift in equilibrium towards the challenge project hours improves the outcomes results, and the change in time allocation does not have a significant impact in the overall students' scores and performance.