It is nice to see bio-inspired design make its way into teacher professional development programs. Has your hypothesis of whether it will attract more female students been corroborated with the evidence, or is it too early to tell? Also, because at some level much of what we take for granted as human design really comes from nature anyway, whether the teachers make connections to the designed world in ways that they are able to extract bioinspired designs in their existing built environment. Great work. 

Thanks for your comments! We've been very limited in what we can do in the classroom so we are still gathering data. Stay tuned!

Stephen, interesting observation about the built world. Our first design project for students is based on thermodynamics, and teachers are able to translate from nature to their designs in that context.  We've also published the paper "Getting Beyond the Hairy House: Using Structure-Function-Mechanism to Advance Biologically Inspired Design Pedagogy," which addresses the pitfalls of copying structure to design, instead of the underlying mechanism. Our SFM scaffolds help teachers focus on mechanism and mechanism transfer. I believe this will translate equally well to the built environment, at least for something like thermodynamics applications.

This is impressive! There's so much we can learn from our environment... this is a project that will truly enhance engagement. Kudos! I voted!!

Michael - Interesting paper. Reminded me of the difference between biologically inspired design (in which the design process is  human-centric), and using biological processes as design conventions, which might include how can a processes of evolvability or ontogeny be part of the design process. Like the additive process of 3D printing being like how bivalves build their shells through a similar additive process. Something to explore, in case teachers bring it up.

Your process for inspiring students to develop design based on biological examples for non-living projects makes it clear that imagination is a powerful and useful tool in scientific  thinking. It requires something more than linear logic.  It provides a good example for understanding John Dewey's interpretation of scientific thinking. Thank you for making me aware of this.

Thank you for making this approach and imperative more accessible.  As human-centered design continues to gain ground, we are challenged is to situate human-centered within bio- or eco-centered; your project helps make the transition possible.   

I am inspired by the work of this project. Beyond the visits to the zoo and botanical gardens, how did you engage the teachers in learning? How do you plan to evaluate the teachers' learning? Will they be expected to develop their own material?

Thanks for the positive comments! We have a professional learning program we use to help the teachers deploy the curriculum effectively. One of our goals is to use this experience to understand how best to do this, and identify the right level of biology to help the (primarily) engineering teachers be confident and prepared. We'll use this knowledge to design an asynchronous web based platform so we can reach anyone who wants to learn this. Our experience has been that it's hard to expect people to master both the biology and the design/engineering concepts, so we provide as much material as we can, which we hope will prepare the teachers for an open ended design based project for the most advanced students and classes. 

Thank you for sharing your work. We are doing a professional development program for biology teachers and one of our challenges is finding ways to incorporate engineering design. I wonder whether you would be able to share the templates you’ve designed for structure function mechanism? 

Rebecca,

Thank you for your interest. Biologically Inspired Design is a wonderful mechanism to link biology and engineering.  We use Structure-Function-Mechanism models as the bridge for understanding both biology and designed systems, creating a shared language and providing some mental traction when reaching across to a new discipline. It also puts some bones on the NGSS structure-function cross-cutting concept and takes it one level deeper with mechanism.  We'd be delighted to share the method and the models we've developed, and to hear more about your efforts to teach engineering to biology teachers, and the challenges you face.

I am fascinated by this project and how innovative it is. Are you developing modules for teacher to use, co-developing them with them? How do you envision the school-based part of the support going? Thanks.

This is so fantastic!!! I am a member of the Society for the Preservation of Natural History Collections Education Sessional Committee and we are hosting a virtual Natural History Collection Education DemoCamp. The goal is to share, discover, and discuss educational materials that have a framework in natural history. This project would be a perfect fit so if you all have the bandwidth to participate please do! We really want to build more connections between museums, zoos and botanical gardens! Please see the website https://spnhc.org/education-democamp/ for more info, or please reach out with more questions! We also have an Open Educational Resources Portal where you can post your finished materials to get them out there to a broader audience: https://qubeshub.org/community/groups/collections

This is very cool! I'm excited to hear about next steps - how the teachers use the information in their classrooms. Thanks for your work!

This was a wonderful presentation that shows how being a good biologist with a broad organismal background can provide new perspective in so many fields.  The concepts in bio design and biomimicry are not as well known as they should be.  Thank you for making this.  

Nice to hear that bio-inspired design is being introduced during high school and leveraged as a means to attract more girls into engineering. We introduce it to 5th graders who go on to design bio-inspired robots, modeled after projects by colleague Dr. Krishna Kaipa does with his engineering students.