BEAT: Branding and Entrepreneurship of Assistive Technology for Social Good

This paper describes the opportunities and challenges found in incorporating both branding and entrepreneurship components into an engineering senior design course (Capstone course). This newly upgraded course is called BEAT: Branding and Entrepreneurship of Assistive Technology. The original joint senior design course on assistive technology has been run for over ten years, serving undergraduate seniors in computer science, computer engineering and electrical engineering at CCNY, working on assistive technology projects to help people in need. The class had informally included entrepreneurial components in the past, but from 2019 on, we formally integrated both branding and entrepreneurship components into the curriculum. This paper describes the motivation of the work, the four key components in the course syllabus, a number of student evaluation mechanisms, course outcomes so far and results of a student survey, and some final discussions of the opportunities we provide to our students and challenges we face in implementing this cross-disciplinary curriculum.