NSF Awards: 1907906
Biologically Inspired Design (BID) is the process of learning and abstracting mechanisms from the biological world, to be applied to human design challenges, therefore straddling the domains of engineering, design and biology. BID has been shown to be highly engaging for students, and we hypothesize the biological component may be used to increase female participation in high school engineering courses. In the high school context, however, domain expertise across engineering and biology is usually siloed across departments, with little interaction or cross-content specialization. In our program Biologically Inspired Design for Engineering Education (BIRDEE), we seek to teach high school students engineering using BID. Given the gaps between engineering and biological specialization, how then might we provide professional learning experiences for engineering instructors to raise their biological awareness to teach BID with the necessary degree of confidence and content knowledge? In this video we show how teacher field trips to Zoo Atlanta and the Atlanta Botanical Gardens are used during summer professional training to enrich teacher understanding of biology from an engineering perspective, and to equip such teachers to handle the wide variety of biological sources of inspiration they might encounter in our curriculum.
Stephen Uzzo
Chief Scientist
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.
Michael Helms
Meltem Alemdar
Marc Weissburg
Professor
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!
Michael Helms
Senior Research Scientist
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.
Ekundayo Shittu
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 Helms
Michael Helms
Senior Research Scientist
Thank you Ekundayo. Our early experience with teachers suggests not only strong engagement when they are able to see and interact with live biology in the context of design, but an entirely new perspective for viewing the natural world through a designers lens. It is very fulfilling to watch in action. We structure out curriculum to make sure that students and teachers get into the natural world and have hands-on experiences with organisms as they are thinking about design. Making that connection can be transformative.
Stephen Uzzo
Chief Scientist
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.
George Hein
Professor Emeritus
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.
Michael Helms
Senior Research Scientist
You hit the nail on the head. Bio-inspired design is a form of analogical thinking (or Design by Analogy, aka DbA), which breaks us out of our all too familiar logical pathways. Working with nature also evokes joy and positive feelings, which are so very helpful in the current learning environment.
Rebecca Sansom
Erica Wortham
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.
Michael Helms
Senior Research Scientist
Thank you Erica, I couldn't agree more. Expanding the design context will be critical for future designers to solve our 21st century challenges.
Folashade Solomon
Associate Professor
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?
Marc Weissburg
Professor
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.
Rebecca Sansom
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?
Michael Helms
Senior Research Scientist
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.
Danielle Dani
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.
Michael Helms
Senior Research Scientist
Thank you Danielle for your interest. We are developing a sequence 3 units, about 8 weeks each, for teachers to use in high school engineering courses, with the idea of using one unit per year as students progress through the engineering sequence. We use DBIR practices in developing the units, taking teacher input into account both during professional development, and as they teach. As part of that, we meet with teachers weekly during implementation to review lessons, take notes on what works and does not, and to discuss upcoming lessons. We also observe a few classrooms each week. All of this input goes into refining the final product. Our goal is to provide purely online professional development support for scale up, which we will begin to pilot in the final year of this project, and hope to expand to a more fully featured online platform and support community in future scale up work. As we learn more, we are discovering a wide variety of supplemental resources and content that can be developed to make this widely available. For example, our partnerships with the Zoo and Garden which were not a part of the original research plan, provide us with these unique experiences for teachers, and more content than we can ingest. We're still trying to figure out the best ways to scale these experiences for online professional development.
Danielle Dani
Molly Phillips
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
Michael Helms
Senior Research Scientist
Molly, thank you. That looks like a great fit. I'm not sure we can participate this June, as it coincides with our Summer teacher training, but once we have statistical results that support that the research works as intended with students, we can certainly look at sharing through your distribution network.
Molly Phillips
Yes that would be wonderful! Let us know how we can help!
Abigail Helsinger
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!
Susan Keen
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.
Jennifer Kidd
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.