Laboratory integration of emerging topics into existing curriculum

The growing body of scientific and engineering knowledge, against the current economic and political realities restricting the number of credits required to obtain a degree, constitutes a significant challenge in designing tomorrow's engineering curriculum. More novel content from emerging areas of engineering needs to be integrated into the curriculum, without sacrificing the fundamental background, and without increasing the credit count. We propose a laboratory based approach to this dilemma, where the novel content is introduced as applications within the laboratory exercises of the course with the closest topical area within the existing curriculum. We use biomedical engineering concepts as the novel area and electrical & computer engineering courses as the existing curriculum in our implementation, to increase awareness and interest in biomedical engineering. We discuss our reasons for choosing biomedical engineering as the novel content, present the implementation details of our approach, as well as the assessment results of our initial implementation.