BME382: Designing games to learn entire product development cycle

This is a hands-on lab course at Arizona State University for junior-level students in Bioengineering. It teaches each phase of product design; from establishing market need and brainstorming to product manufacturing, production, and commercialization. The course meets 3 hours per week over a 15 week term with a class size of 150 students. The class uses a surrogate product for a medical device to emphasize the actual process of prototyping. The surrogate product used for teaching is a board game, as games are easier to understand and create, i.e. it allows for students to immerse themselves immediately into product design and experimentation.

Since medical device and FDA topics are covered in other courses, we refrain from direct discourse of those topics in this course. Students will work together over the course of the semester to design and fabricate a board game, while focusing on the aspects of Biomedical Engineering design and business plan development. This course allows students to use engineering design methods, experimental practices, fabrication and prototyping techniques, and basic business skills. This course provides hands on design of all parts of the board game using various methods of fabrication. This course could be adapted by any instructor teaching an upper-level design course in any major.