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Title: Biologically Inspired Design For High School Engineering Students (Work in Progress)
Biologically inspired design (BID) has gained attention in undergraduate and graduate engineering programs throughout the United States, and more post-secondary institutions are beginning to implement it into their engineering curriculum [1], [2]. However, little has been done to introduce BID concepts more formally into the K-12 curriculum. Consequently, a research study funded by the National Science Foundation focused on developing a BID integrated engineering curriculum for high school students. The curriculum is designed to integrate BID into the engineering design process (EDP) by leveraging analogical design tools that facilitate a transfer of biological strategies to design challenges. This enables students to understand both the engineering problem and the biological system that could be used to inspire design solutions. In this paper, we describe students’ application of BID integration in the engineering design process and their experiences utilizing BID as they solve design challenges.
The curriculum was pilot tested in two 9th grade engineering classrooms across two schools during Spring 2022. Data was collected from four groups of students (n=12) enrolled in the engineering courses across two schools. The study includes classroom observations, student artifacts, and student focus groups. We utilized qualitative content analysis, a descriptive approach to analyzing student data [3], [4], to uncover the meaning and presence of text, messages, images, and transcriptions of dialogues [4]. In this study, we aim to capture the evidence of students’ experiences and engagement with BID concepts.
The preliminarily findings illustrate that student groups enjoyed BID activities presented in the curriculum as they promoted students’ exploration of biological systems. BID integration allowed students to view nature differently, which some students indicated they had not previously employed for their design solutions. Although some students mentioned BID activities that helped them during the brainstorming phase of the design process, they were unable to explain BID integration in their final design solutions, unless prompted by the teacher. Furthermore, across the student groups, students indicated that prototype and test was the most engaging stage of the EDP since during this stage they were able to test their designs. This research is novel in its focus on understanding high school students’ experiences with the integration of BID in engineering and has important implications for diversifying engineering in K-12 education. more »« less
This Research paper explores the activities within
the biologically inspired design-focused engineering curriculum to
determine if they fostered students’ engagement in learning. This
work builds on concurrent research exploring students'
application of BID in engineering and teachers’ implementation of
BID within their respective engineering classrooms. Participants
comprised ninth-grade high school students (n=12) enrolled in the
first-year engineering course across two high schools. Qualitative
content analysis was conducted on classroom observation field
notes, student focus groups, teacher curriculum enactment
surveys, and teacher interviews. The finding revealed that student
engagement varied across the seven-week-long unit. In the initial
week, engagement was relatively low since the activities were static
and required learning to be scaffolded via worksheets. However,
during weeks three through six, engagement positively shifted due
to the activities being more dynamic, requiring students to engage
in inquiry and design learning. Furthermore, students’ academic
engagement was fostered due to hands-on experiences and workbased
authentic problems presented in the unit, which encouraged
collaboration.
Moore, Roxanne A.; Ehsan, Hoda; Kim, Euisun; Helms, Michael; Alemdar, Meltem; Rosen, Jeffrey; Cappelli, Christopher J.; Weissburg, Marc(
, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Frontiers in Engineering Educario)
This innovative practice work in progress paper presents the Biologically Inspired Design for Engineering Education (BTRDEE) project, to create socially relevant, accessible, highly-contextualized biologically inspired design experiences that can be disseminated to high school audiences engineering audiences in Georgia and nationally. Curriculum units arc 6-10 weeks in duration and will meet many standards for high school engineering courses in Georgia. There will be three curriculum units (one for each engineering course in the 3-course pathway), each building skills in engineering design and specific skills for BID. Currently in its second year, BIRDEE has developed its first unit of curriculum and has hosted its first professional development with 4 pilot teachers in the summer of 2020. The BIRDEE curriculum situates challenges within socially relevant contexts and provides cutting-edge biological scenarios to ignite creative and humanistic engineering experiences to 1) drive greaterengagement in engineering, particularly among women, 2) improve student engineering skills, especially problem definition and ideation skills, and 3) increase students awareness of the connection and impacts between the engineered and living worlds.
This paper describes the motivation for the BIRDEE project, the learning goals for the curriculum, and a description of the first unit. We provide reflections and feedback from teacher work and focus groups during our summer professional development and highlight the challenges associated with building BID competency across biology and engineering to equip teachers with the skills they need to teach the BIRDEE units. These lessons can be applied to teaching BID more broadly, as its multidisciplinary nature creates challenges (and opportunities) for teaching and learning engineering design.
Helms, M(
, International Design Engineering Technical Conferences and Computers and Information in Engineering Conference)
In this case study we report on the use of a Next Generation
Science Standards (NGSS)-aligned form of Structure-Behavior-
Function, called Structure-Function-Mechanism (SFM), to teach
four high school engineering teachers an approach for
Biologically Inspired Design (BID). Functional theories of
design describe a natural way in which designers solve design
problems. They provide support for case-based and analogicalbased
reasoning systems and have been used successfully to
teach BID to undergraduate students. We found that teachers
instructed on BID practice and pedagogy using our modified
theory were able to grasp the structural concepts and looked for
clear markers separating mechanism (behavior) and function.
Because of the systems-of-systems nature of most biological
entities, these boundaries were often subjective, presenting
unique challenge to teachers. As high school engineering
teachers look for methods to enhance their pedagogy and to
understand multidisciplinary content, these findings will inform
future curriculum development and professional learning
approaches for engineering education.
Despite recent progress in the adoption of engineering at the K-12 level, the scarcity of high-quality engineering curricula remains a challenge. With support from a previous NSF grant, our research team iteratively developed the three-year middle school engineering curricula, STEM-ID. Through a series of contextualized challenges, the 18-week STEM-ID curricula incorporate foundational mathematics and science skills and practices and advanced manufacturing tools such as computer aided design (CAD) and 3D printing, while introducing engineering concepts like pneumatics, aeronautics, and robotics.
Our current project, supported by an NSF DRK-12 grant, seeks to examine the effectiveness of STEM-ID when implemented in diverse schools within a large school district in the southeastern United States. This paper will present early findings of the project’s implementation research conducted over two school years with a total of ten engineering teachers in nine schools. Guided by the Innovation Implementation framework (Century & Cassata, 2014), our implementation research triangulates observation, interview, and survey data to describe overall implementation of STEM-ID as well as implementation of six critical components of the curricula: engaging students in the engineering design process (EDP), math-science integration, collaborative group work, contextualized challenges, utilization of advanced manufacturing technology, and utilization of curriculum materials. Implementation data provide clear evidence that each of the critical components of STEM-ID were evident as the curricula were enacted in participating schools. Our data indicate strong implementation of four critical components (utilization of materials, math-science integration, collaborative group work, and contextualized challenges) across teachers. Engaging students in the EDP and advanced-manufacturing technology were implemented, to varying degrees, by all but two teachers. As expected, implementation of critical components mirrored overall implementation patterns, with teachers who completed more of the curricula tending to implement the critical components more fully than those who did not complete the curricula. In addition to tracking implementation of critical components, the project is also interested in understanding contextual factors that influence enactment of the curricula, including characteristics of the STEM-ID curricula, teachers, and organizations (school and district). Interview and observation data suggest a number of teacher characteristics that may account for variations in implementation including teachers’ organization and time management skills, self-efficacy, and pedagogical content knowledge (PCK). Notably, prior teaching experience did not consistently translate into higher completion rates, emphasizing the need for targeted support regardless of teachers' backgrounds. This research contributes valuable insights into the challenges and successes of implementing engineering curricula in diverse educational settings.
Aldemir, Tugce; Davidesco, Ido; Kelly, Susan Meabh; Glaser, Noah; Kyle, Aaron M.; Montrosse-Moorhead, Bianca; Lane, Katie(
, Education Sciences)
STEM integration has become a national and international priority, but our understanding of student learning experiences in integrated STEM courses, especially those that integrate life sciences and engineering design, is limited. Our team has designed a new high school curriculum unit that focuses on neural engineering, an emerging interdisciplinary field that brings together neuroscience, technology, and engineering. Through the implementation of the unit in a high school engineering design course, we asked how incorporating life sciences into an engineering course supported student learning and what challenges were experienced by the students and their teacher. To address these questions, we conducted an exploratory case study consisting of a student focus group, an interview with the teacher, and analysis of student journals. Our analysis suggests that students were highly engaged by the authentic and collaborative engineering design process, helping solidify their self-efficacy and interest in engineering design. We also identified some challenges, such as students’ lower interest in life sciences compared to engineering design and the teacher lacking a life sciences background. These preliminary findings suggest that neural engineering can provide an effective context to the integration of life sciences and engineering design but more scaffolding and teacher support is needed for full integration.
Alemdar, Meltem, Baptiste_Porter, Dyanne, Rehmat, Abeera, Helms, Michael, Towner, Alexandra, Moore, Roxanne, Rosen, Jeffrey, Varnedoe, Julia, and Weissburg, Marc. Biologically Inspired Design For High School Engineering Students (Work in Progress). Retrieved from https://par.nsf.gov/biblio/10523767. Web. doi:10.18260/1-2--42371.
Alemdar, Meltem, Baptiste_Porter, Dyanne, Rehmat, Abeera, Helms, Michael, Towner, Alexandra, Moore, Roxanne, Rosen, Jeffrey, Varnedoe, Julia, and Weissburg, Marc.
"Biologically Inspired Design For High School Engineering Students (Work in Progress)". Country unknown/Code not available: ASEE Conferences. https://doi.org/10.18260/1-2--42371.https://par.nsf.gov/biblio/10523767.
@article{osti_10523767,
place = {Country unknown/Code not available},
title = {Biologically Inspired Design For High School Engineering Students (Work in Progress)},
url = {https://par.nsf.gov/biblio/10523767},
DOI = {10.18260/1-2--42371},
abstractNote = {Biologically inspired design (BID) has gained attention in undergraduate and graduate engineering programs throughout the United States, and more post-secondary institutions are beginning to implement it into their engineering curriculum [1], [2]. However, little has been done to introduce BID concepts more formally into the K-12 curriculum. Consequently, a research study funded by the National Science Foundation focused on developing a BID integrated engineering curriculum for high school students. The curriculum is designed to integrate BID into the engineering design process (EDP) by leveraging analogical design tools that facilitate a transfer of biological strategies to design challenges. This enables students to understand both the engineering problem and the biological system that could be used to inspire design solutions. In this paper, we describe students’ application of BID integration in the engineering design process and their experiences utilizing BID as they solve design challenges. The curriculum was pilot tested in two 9th grade engineering classrooms across two schools during Spring 2022. Data was collected from four groups of students (n=12) enrolled in the engineering courses across two schools. The study includes classroom observations, student artifacts, and student focus groups. We utilized qualitative content analysis, a descriptive approach to analyzing student data [3], [4], to uncover the meaning and presence of text, messages, images, and transcriptions of dialogues [4]. In this study, we aim to capture the evidence of students’ experiences and engagement with BID concepts. The preliminarily findings illustrate that student groups enjoyed BID activities presented in the curriculum as they promoted students’ exploration of biological systems. BID integration allowed students to view nature differently, which some students indicated they had not previously employed for their design solutions. Although some students mentioned BID activities that helped them during the brainstorming phase of the design process, they were unable to explain BID integration in their final design solutions, unless prompted by the teacher. Furthermore, across the student groups, students indicated that prototype and test was the most engaging stage of the EDP since during this stage they were able to test their designs. This research is novel in its focus on understanding high school students’ experiences with the integration of BID in engineering and has important implications for diversifying engineering in K-12 education.},
journal = {},
volume = {na},
number = {na},
publisher = {ASEE Conferences},
author = {Alemdar, Meltem and Baptiste_Porter, Dyanne and Rehmat, Abeera and Helms, Michael and Towner, Alexandra and Moore, Roxanne and Rosen, Jeffrey and Varnedoe, Julia and Weissburg, Marc},
editor = {NA}
}
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