Proteus has received a prestigious Ingenious Public Engagement Award from the Royal Academy of Engineering that will allow the team to design and build a new teaching tool to inspire the next generation of biomedical engineers.
The new biomedical engineering project – Circuits! – is led by Proteus’ Dr Helen Szoor-McElhinney (The University of Edinburgh) and Dr Melanie Jimenez (The University of Glasgow).
Circuits! offers teachers a creative and innovative way to teach Secondary School pupils about biomedical engineering. It will enhance the current Scottish curriculum by providing new insights into the applications of biomedical engineering research, including diagnostic technologies for lung disease and infectious diseases such as malaria.
Circuits! will also provide teachers with a broader understanding of the role that engineering plays in biomedicine, and support them in teaching this in an engaging way to students.
Teachers (from Liberton High School) and engineers (from Universities of Edinburgh and Glasgow) will come together to design and develop the tool, showing pupils how bioengineering shapes their daily lives and how they could go on to become the engineers of the future.
Providing quality-learning experiences for Scottish school students lies at the heart of the Curriculum for Excellence. Education Scotland has identified three possible routes for delivering this aim: active learning, collaborative learning and digital games-based learning. Circuits! will adopt the three identified approaches to create impact within the curriculum.
“We are looking forward to working with teachers and engineers to develop this new teaching tool, which we hope will change the way students think about biomedical engineering and how they can help shape the field by their involvement now and in the future”, said Helen.
Find out more about the Ingenious award here: http://www.raeng.org.uk/grants-and-prizes/ingenious-grant