A Spiral Curriculum Approach to Multidisciplinary Human-Centered Engineering Design: Integrating History, Equity, and Accessibility into A First-Year Engineering Course

Introduction: Biomedical engineering demands engineers who are well-versed in the engineering design process and can synthesize information across many topics, ideate effectively, and solve complex problems. It requires engagement with diverse stakeholders, balancing their needs and expectations with ethical, financial, and engineering constraints, and understanding the context, background, and culture of the communities served. In a first-year liberal arts and engineering course at Boston College, Making the Modern World, we challenge students to explore these expectations in engineering design projects themed around accessibility. Course feedback has indicated that students struggled to identify connections back to lecture topics during laboratory exercises and that the design process required stronger scaffolding. Accordingly, we have redesigned the course to incorporate a spiral curriculum, taking students through several smaller, guided engineering-design experiences before engaging in an open-ended, long-form project on designing for accessibility.

Materials and

Methods: Making the Modern World incorporates both a lecture and laboratory component and is co-taught by faculty in engineering and history. The lecture establishes engineering fundamentals within sociohistorical examples that reinforce ethics and social responsibility themes. The redesigned laboratory uses a flipped classroom spiral curriculum where students incorporate lecture topics as they practice engineering design in two increasingly complex real-world projects: a small-scale project in which students analyze open-source data from Boston’s bike share company, analyzing it for utilization, efficiency, and demand, and learning about project scoping, engineering requirements and constraints, and the effect of engineered solutions on communities. Students must then build upon these skills independently in the final engineering design project (Figure 1).

Results, Conclusions, and Discussions: Reinforcing learning objectives in a spiral curriculum had the dual outcome of helping students connect sociohistorical topics with engineering decision-making and strengthening understanding and employment of engineering design. For example, evaluating bike-share data for efficiency, demand, and socioeconomic status challenged students to contend with economic differences across Boston neighborhoods, with some groups drawing connections to historical redlining and suggesting improvements to improve transport and access in disadvantaged communities. Guided introduction to engineering design criteria improved student understanding before engaging independently in the design process and allowed students to reflect on the feasibility of their ideas. Student feedback indicated that topics were well-aligned and that students felt the social and historical emphases reinforced their understanding of ethics in engineering. Final engineering projects illustrated how students engaged with the topic of accessibility: projects ranged from designing software to address food security, addressing neurodiverse individuals' sense of belongingness and engagement with university resources, assistive designs to facilitate access to over-the-counter medicines, and designs to support improved mobility of students with temporary or permanent physical disabilities.
Overall, the opportunity to revisit these topics and establish connections between engineering design, accessibility, and sociocultural considerations allowed students to explore health-related and biomedical topics emphasizing equity and inclusion and improved their ability to communicate their final designs. In an end-of-semester design conference used as a final deliverable for the engineering design project, judges stated that team presentations empathetically and effectively communicated how their projects addressed stakeholder needs, negotiated design constraints and requirements, and demonstrated the effectiveness of their solutions through contextually informed success metrics.

Through iterative and sequentially deepening exposure to increasingly complex facets of engineering design, this first-year engineering curriculum effectively introduces students to fundamental engineering topics through an ethical and sociocultural framework emphasizing inclusivity and equity. A spiral curriculum deepened students’ understanding of engineering design and the connections to the societal impacts of engineering solutions. While primarily targeted at a general engineering audience, using the topics of accessibility and health alongside empathetically considering the sociocultural positionality of the engineers and individuals we engineer for is of key importance to biomedical engineering education.

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