BME377T:Development

BME377T course development scratch pad. Feel free to use this as a repository for ideas, notes, and resources.

Course Description

Recruitment E-mail Draft

Social Entrepreneurship & Engineering is a project-based course to help bring out and build up your creativity, brainstorming, and team building skills towards social innovations.

...okay, that's all I could think of because I just incorporated those key phrases into one sentence. :( Huda, help.

Alright, how about this:

Last spring, two BME students felt the need to think outside of the box, to increase their opportunities to brainstorm with their peers, and to explore career options that go beyond maintaining the status quo—careers that could potentially impact society. So, with Dr. Randi Voss, they decided to create a new class—Social Entrepreneurship and Engineering—a project-based course to help bring out and build up creativity, brainstorming, and team building skills towards social innovations.

During the semester, we will study a broad range of social concerns, examine success stories of individuals who made a difference in their community, select an issue on which to concentrate, develop a creative strategy to raise awareness of that particular issue—be it film, advertisement, speech, etc.—and then attempt to “solve” this issue through whatever ways are relevant.

Our goals may seem somewhat lofty, but we believe that this is the best time to think big, to find others who are interested in the same goals, and to really explore our potentials. Why wait until we graduate when we can start now?

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed it’s the only thing that ever has.” —Margaret Mead

Key phrases

• students teaching students
• thinking outside the box
• developing creative process
• contributing to society
  • thinking about others besides ourselves
• bme more than just med school and grad school
  • other career options?

Recruitment

Within biomedical engineering

• Cindy
• Word of mouth

Outside biomedical engineering

• Ask Cindy!
• Flyers

Resources

Websites

• TED: Ideas worth spreading
  • Allison Hunt tells of her story of broken health care systems in a humorous anecdote about her hip-replacement surgery
  • Photographer Gregory Colbert shares his breath-taking video from Ashes and Snow
  • Dean Kamen discusses new prosthetic arm
  • Hans Rosling debunks myths with amazing graphical statistics
    • Follow-up in 2007 about the Trendalyzer, Dollar Street
  • Jacqueline Novogratz reveals ways to make poverty history
• PBS The New Heroes
• SE Competition
• By SE for SE
• Uncommon Heroes Video
• MIT Press
• Social Enterprise Reporter
• MIT D-Lab
  • MIT D-Lab 2

Books

• The Myths of Innovation, Scott Berkun
• The Art of Innovation, Tom Kelley
• The Ten Faces of Innovation, Tom Kelley
• Thinker Toys, Michael Michalko
  • Social Entrepreneurship: combining two antagonistic concepts into one (making money, doing social good)
  • Einstein's Paradox (lead by following, win by losing, etc).