Bioengineering is possibly the most multidisciplinary branch of engineering that we teach. It combines biological and chemical knowledge with electronics and coding, alongside materials and mechanics, to design and build technologies for supporting and enhancing living systems.
One of our greatest strengths as a Multidisicplinary Engineering Education department is how we can cross discipline boundaries so easily, by just talking to colleagues in our teams or popping into the lab next door. This puts us in the perfect place to design and build inspirational equipment encompassing many areas of engineering, just like the bioreactor prototype shown below.
We designed a guided project for students to build bioreactors capable of growing algae over a two week period, with full control of reactor subsystems. The students not only need to master electronics design and coding of the system controller, but also be able to quantify the amount of algae produced by using optical density measurement of the glycerol output. This enabled a study of the optimum salinity for algae growth, using data from the whole class and statistical methods taught in a companion course.
The students work in teams to produce their bioreactors over six lab sessions, in an innovative teaching style where all lab activities happen simultaneously. Even though there are well-defined electronics and control systems tasks, and biological/chemical tasks, all students must try their hands at everything.
This 5 minute video shows our work in developing a guided scaffolding project for second year bioengineers. It perfectly fills the gap between the lecture content and basic skills labs in first year, and the independent, creative and innovative group projects in third year.
This work was presented at the IEEE FIE Conference 2020, and the full paper can be found here.
Producing this exciting new teaching style was a full departmental effort, and I'd particularly like to thank all of the technical staff who worked very hard preparing the course equipment and kits.