Check out the student work submitted for real-world industry feedback! Learn more about submitting student work to receive real-world feedback here!

Grade: High School

PLTW Course: Principles of Biomedical Science

Submission type:  Activity: Visit Plan

Project overview: In Principles of Biomedical Science, students prepare for a career in medicine or health care and are challenged to solve real-world problems. Students practice how to think creatively and critically to innovate in science and gain practical experience tackling challenges that biomedical professionals face in the field. They work through real-world situations, cases, and problems, such as solving a medical mystery case, diagnosing and treating a patient, and responding to a medical outbreak.

The series of activities leading up to this project are a part of a lesson called “Talk to Your Doc”.  In these activities students have been learning about healthcare by pretending to work different jobs at a Total Care Clinic.  Each patient they saw highlighted key clinical skills as well as allowed students to explore biological and physiological content. Students explored effective questioning techniques, collected and analyzed vital signs from a patient, interpreted the results of routine bloodwork, etc.

In this culminating project, students are attempting to apply what they have learned to design a plan for a routine visit of a patient with a chronic health condition.

Select student submission materials:

Link to full project: click here

Select judge feedback: “Hello! I work at Harvard Medical School as a lecturer in immunology. I specifically work at a sub-office of the medical school called HMX where we make online courses related to a number of different biomedical sciences. These courses get taken by medical students, people working at biotech companies, and all sorts of other people, and I’m in charge of making content covering immunology-related topics.

Overall, this is a great presentation. The steps are very easy to follow, and the test data you included give me an excellent idea of what the patient is like. The patient history is clear and complete, and the description of epilepsy provides good background on this condition. I think all your suggestions for questions, preventative measures, and protecting the patient’s privacy make sense too, so I think this visit would go very well.

One thing that your presentation left me wondering is how you will follow up with the patient to ensure things are going well and that they are listening to your recommendations. You mention things like monitoring the cholesterol levels, sleep, medication etc., but not the schedule for the monitoring or how they will communicate the results back to you. Will they need to come into the office regularly for EEGs? Or if they’re monitoring their own sleep and medication use, can they report that back to you themselves, possibly using telehealth?

I think this project is a great way for you to start working in the biomedical sciences. Whether you end up doing research, treating patients, or doing some other type of science-related work, everything we do in this field relates back to making sure that patients are getting the treatment they need, and we should always keep that in mind. This work shows that you understand that connection and I hope you do more in this field as you go forward!”

-Lecturer in Immunology, Harvard Medical School

“Hello, I am a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard studying aging using worms. I really enjoyed reading through your project outlining a plan for Robby Goldman in the clinic. Scientists in my field regularly use several of the techniques you proposed to use to assess the patient’s state, such as blood testing.

I thought your project was organized very nicely. It was easy for me to understand the flow of the visit and the types of information that would need to be gathered or acted upon. I also liked the ideas you had for potential tests to use to try and help the patient receive the best care.

I am sure you may have already had some of these ideas on your own, but as I was reading, these were some things I thought may be good to incorporate in to your plan for the visit: it may be nice to add more information regarding how the patient could follow up remotely if necessary.

I found your project very thorough and thoughtful!  This type of planning you have done is a skill used everyday by myself and my peers. Having a good plan is essential for success in STEM fields. If you are interested in further pursuing a career in STEM you are off to a great start!”

-Postdoctoral Fellow, Harvard

Industry Award: 2nd Place High School Biomedical Science Project

School: Woburn High School

Teacher: Deb Kreutzer