Community colleges were recently featured in Prism Magazine of the American Society for Engineering Education.
Brighter Outlook: Community Colleges Find that Faculty-Student Research Projects Help Spot and Develop STEM Talent
Community colleges aren’t known as crucibles of medical innovation. Then there’s Itasca Community College in Grand Rapids, Minn., and a gadget students there developed called the Cardiac Sound Reproduction Apparatus for Improved Stethoscope Testing. It’s a smart stethoscope, able to tell a healthy heart from a diseased one and measure and record 19 different defects that can be detected by sound.
Though seldom performed at community colleges and still a rarity in their engineering departments, this kind of research is starting to catch on as educators and the government look to community colleges to assume a larger role in building a bigger and more diverse workforce in the science, technology, engineering, and math fields.