Board 17: Work in Progress: Prosthetic Design Cases as an Educational Tool In and Out of the Classroom

Abstract

This study examines student educational outcomes from working on prosthetic limb design inside and outside of the classroom. The Helping Hand Project (HHP) is a nonprofit organization that builds custom prosthetic devices for children with amputations. The HHP does so through the involvement of students working in an extracurricular club, and by partnering with the Design and Manufacturing II course, a class open to 3rd year engineering undergraduates in the UNC & NCSU Joint Department of Biomedical Engineering. In this study, student outcomes, which include technical skills, design ability, teamwork, and business skills, were surveyed before and after building prosthetic devices either in or out of the classroom. This will aid in identifying where students perceive the value in such an activity and allow comparisons between in and out of classroom settings. Survey results from students in the design class on average improve in each category, whereas students in the extracurricular club activities saw improvement only in the technical and design skills categories. In each category, the design students saw on average a greater increase in confidence.

Large gravitational waves and the Lyth bound in multi-brane inflation

“…Of course, there is problem in our case with ordinary particle theory model building as the results were consistently derived from M-theory [22]. Similar conclusions hold for all multi-brane inflation models [23] or the string theory realization [58] of N-flation [59].…”

“…In fact the latter parametric weakening of the Lyth bound plus large energy density to large distance transformation is characteristic of all multi-brane inflation models, even though they might not generate sizable gravitational waves. In multi-brane inflation models [23] the multi-inflaton description can often be reduced to an effective singleinflaton description, depending on the amount of symmetry of the multi-brane setup. Given that this is the case, the effective canonically normalized inflaton ϕ is related to the microscopic open string distance modulus ΔX, which describes e.g.…”

“…Given that this is the case, the effective canonically normalized inflaton ϕ is related to the microscopic open string distance modulus ΔX, which describes e.g. the common distance between adjacent branes in a hypercubic lattice arrangement, via [23]…”

“…The renormalization coefficient c N , which depends on the number of interacting branes, N, scales like [23] c N ∼ N b , b>0 (29) with positive scaling exponent b, depending on the way in which the branes are distributed over the compactification manifold; e.g. for a uniform distribution over a d-dimensional hypercubic lattice one finds b = 3/(2d) [23]. The Lyth bound is then parametrically…”