What is Biomedical Engineering?
For the FemEng in Malawi 2021 Project, created outreach workshop materials about Biomedical Engineering to help teach schoolchildren in Malawi about the field and why it may be an interesting subject to study at university.
Overview
For the FemEng in Malawi 2021 Project, created outreach workshop materials about Biomedical Engineering to help teach schoolchildren in Malawi about the field and why it may be an interesting subject to study at university. Materials included a hand-drawn colouring-page comic and worksheet that discussed some of the different Biomedical Engineering subfields & applications. Created a slideshow and video introducing BME, expanding on some of the topics discussed in the worksheet comic. Finally, the slideshow itself included original graphic designs and illustrations.
About FemEng in Malawi 2020/2021
FemEng in Malawi is a collaboration between female engineering students at the Malawi University of Science and Technology and female engineering students University of Glasgow that aims to encourage more young people - particularly young women - to consider a career in STEM. The project was multidisciplinary - our team had Civil Engineering students, Aeronautical Engineering students, Biomedical Engineering students, Product Design Engineering students, Chemical Engineering students, Metallurgy and Materials Engineering students, and Manufacturing Engineering students from the two universities.
The project involves educational outreach to schoolchildren (primary school) in Malawi, to introduce engineering in a fun and engaging way. It involves hands-on workshops (literally, in the case of the Biomedical Cardboard Hand workshop), as well as engaging worksheets - such as the colouring / comic page shown here. Although the Glasgow team was originally supposed to travel to Malawi to help deliver the workshops, we were unable to due to the pandemic, and ended up filming videos instead. All of the workshop materials we created through this project are open sourced and available for educators anywhere in the world to use.
Visit the FemEng in Malawi website to learn more about the project!
My main role on the team was Finance, however, this project entry is specifically about my contributions to the outreach aspect of the project. For the video, I was tasked with introducing Biomedical Engineering to the students, to provide a transition into the cardboard hand workshop. For the worksheet, again, I was tasked with creating a worksheet introducing or relating to Biomedical Engineering.
Worksheet Comic
I hand-drew the worksheet comic on my tablet chromebook, using a note-taking app called Squid. (Although it is a strange choice of drawing program, I found that it is very convenient because all drawings and notes are created as vectors, making scaling and exporting PNGs and PDFs an absolute breeze). This comic took me probably around a week to complete.
Biomedical Workshop Video
Slide Graphics
Here are screenshots of the slide graphics that I designed for the workshop presentation video. I designed them using Canva Pro and GIMP. I may add links to the original quality images to this page at some point - once I find them on my old computer!
Synthetic Biology
Medical Imaging
Prosthetics
Diagnostics
Biomaterials
Lots of other things!