Curriculum

The PLTW Biomedical Sciences™ program offers high school students a dynamic curriculum that uses real world experience and hands on learning. Students with interest in exploring the variety that medicine offers will find PLTW’s Biomedical Sciences™ program a fantastic doorway to the future of the industry.

The Applied Knowledge of Biomedical Sciences™

Project Lead the Way’s Biomedical Sciences™ program is a four year series of courses, designed to bring students closer to the possibilities of a medical based field. The courses are integrated into the students’ core curriculum and designed to expand upon the college preparatory math and science programs.

The Biomedical Sciences™ program uses a combination of activity-based, project-based and problem-based (APPB) learning styles to engage students. APPB learning doesn’t just create and exciting environment where the possibilities of a medical field come to life, but it also teaches students to:

• Solve problems
• Participate as part of a team
• Lead teams
• Conduct research
• Understand real-world problems
• Analyze data
• Learn outside the classroom

Biomedical Sciences Courses™

Principles of the Biomedical Sciences™ (1 Carnegie Unit) - Students explore the concepts of human medicine and are introduced to research processes and to bioinformatics. Hands-on projects enable students to investigate human body systems and various health conditions, including heart disease, diabetes, sickle-cell disease, hypercholesterolemia, and infectious diseases.

Over the length of the course, students work together to determine the factors that led to the death of a fictional person. After pinpointing those factors, the students investigate lifestyle choices and medical treatments that might have prolonged the person’s life.

The course is designed to provide an overview of all the courses in the Biomedical Sciences Program and to lay the scientific foundation necessary for student success in the subsequent courses. The key biological concepts embedded in the curriculum include homeostasis, metabolism, inheritance of traits, feedback systems, and defense against disease. Where appropriate, engineering principles are also incorporated into the curriculum. These include the design process, feedback loops, fluid dynamics, and the relationship of structure to function.

Human Body Systems™ (1 Carnegie Unit) –Students examine the processes, structures, and interactions of the human body systems to learn how they work together to maintain homeostasis (internal balance) and good health.

Using real-world cases, students take the role of biomedical professionals and work together to solve medical mysteries. Hands-on projects include designing experiments, investigating the structures and functions of body systems, and using data acquisition software to monitor body functions such as muscle movement, reflex and voluntary actions, and respiratory operation.

Important concepts covered in the course are communication, transport of substances, locomotion, metabolic processes, defense, and protection.

Medical Intervention™ (1 Carnegie Unit) –Student projects investigate various medical interventions that extend and improve quality of life, including gene therapy, pharmacology, surgery, prosthetics, rehabilitation, and supportive care.

The course explores the design and development of various medical interventions, including vascular stents, cochlear implants, and prosthetic limbs. In addition, students review the history of organ transplants and gene therapy, and stay updated on cutting-edge developments via current scientific literature.

Using 3D imaging, data acquisition software, and current scientific research, students design a product that can be used as a medical intervention.

Science Research™ (1 Carnegie Unit) –This capstone course gives student teams the opportunity to work with a mentor, identify a scientific research topic, conduct research, write a scientific paper, and defend team conclusions and recommendations to a panel of outside reviewers.

Each student team has one or more mentors from the scientific or medical community guiding its scientific research. This course may be combined with the capstone course from the engineering pathway, allowing students from the pathways to work together to engineer a new health care-related product or process innovation. (For more about our high school engineering program, please visit www.pltw.org/curriculum/hsengineering.html.)

Prerequisites

There are no prerequisites to the Principles of the Biomedical Sciences course.

For all other courses, the prerequisites are the courses earlier in the series.

Upper classmen may double up and take more than one PLTW Biomedical Sciences™ course in order to complete the program. If a student starts the program in 10th grade it is recommended that they take one course per year until their senior year when they take both Medical Interventions and Science Research.

Requisite Courses

Students enrolled in the PLTW Biomedical Sciences courses must also be enrolled in college-preparatory mathematics and science courses. The Biomedical Sciences are not designed to replace the traditional science courses; they are designed to enhance them and to focus on the concepts directly related to Biomedical Science.

All students interested in pursuing a career in biological sciences, emergency services, healthcare or medicine. As with the PLTW engineering program, the rigorous curriculum uses the activities, projects, and problems modality that is grounded in real-world relevance. This approach addresses the learning styles and needs of the majority of students. The courses are hands-on and allow students to apply the concepts they learn in other mathematics and science courses.