Description

In No Bones About It: Designing Knee Braces, students explore how biomedical engineers use their understanding of human body systems to design solutions to address health problems. The unit begins with the storybook Erik’s Unexpected Twist, in which a boy named Erik living in Germany applies his understanding of Biomedical Engineering in order to designs a temporary knee brace for an injured classmate. Over the course of the unit, students collect and analyze data about variation in human feet and consider how these data affect the design of running shoes. They investigate the properties of materials and brainstorm how those materials might be useful in designing a knee brace. Like Erik, students then follow the steps of the Engineering Design Process to imagine, plan, create, and improve their own knee brace designs.