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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. 

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. 

Biomimetics must be taught to the next generation of designers in the interest of delivering solutions for current problems. Teaching biomimetics involves teachers and students from and in various disciplines at different stages of the educational system. There is no common understanding of how and what to teach in the different phases of the educational pipeline. This manuscript describes different perspectives, expectations, needs, and challenges of users from various backgrounds. It focuses on how biomimetics is taught at the various stages of education and career: from K-12 to higher education to continuing education. By constructing the biomimetics education pipeline, we find that some industry challenges are addressed and provide opportunities to transfer the lessons to application. We also identify existing gaps in the biomimetics education pipeline that could further advance industry application if a curriculum is developed. 

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. 

This innovative practice work in progress paper presents Biologically inspired design (BID) to transfer design principles identified in nature to human-centered design problems. The Biologically Inspired Design for Engineering Education (BIRDEE) program uses biologically inspired design to teach high school engineering in a way that uniquely engages students in the natural world. For high school students, identifying natural systems’ analogues for human design problems can be challenging. Furthermore, it is often the case that students focus on and transfer superficial structures, rather than underlying design principles. Based on the Structure-Behavior-Function (SBF) design ontology, we developed a modified cognitive scaffold called Structure- Function-Mechanism (SFM) to assist students and teachers with identifying functionally similar biological analogies and identifying and transferring design principles. In this paper we describe SFM and its importance in BID and our observations from teaching SFM to high school teachers during a multi-week professional development workshop in the summer of 2020. Based on teachers’ work artifacts, transcriptions of discussions, and focus groups, we highlight the challenges of teaching SFM and our plans to scaffold this important concept for students and teachers alike. 

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. 

Biologically inspired design has become increasingly common in graduate and undergraduate engineering programs, consistent with an expanding emphasis by professional engineering societies on cross-disciplinary critical thinking skills and adaptive and sustainable design. However, bio-inspired engineering is less common in K-12 education. In 2019, the NSF funded a K-12 project entitled Biologically Inspired Design for Engineering Education (BIRDEE), to create socially relevant, accessible, and highly contextualized high school engineering curricula focusing on bio-inspired design. Studies have shown that women and underrepresented minorities are drawn to curricula, courses, and instructional strategies that are integrated, emphasize systems thinking, and facilitate connection building across courses or disciplines. The BIRDEE project also seeks to interest high school girls in engineering by providing curricula that incorporate humanistic, bio-inspired engineering with a focus on sustainable and authentic design contexts. BIRDEE curricula integrate bio-inspired design into the engineering design process by leveraging design tools that facilitate the application of biological concepts to design challenges. This provides a conceptual framework enabling students to systematically define a design problem, resulting in better, more well-rounded problem specifications. The professional development (PD) for the participating teachers include six-week-long summer internships in university research laboratories focused on biology and bio-inspired design. The goal of these internships is to improve engineering teachers’ knowledge of bio-inspired design by partnering with cutting-edge engineers and scientists to study animal features and behaviors and their applications to engineering design. However, due to COVID-19 and research lab closures in the summer of 2020, the research team had to transfer the summer PD experience to an online setting. An asynchronous, quasi-facilitated online course was developed and delivered to teachers over six weeks. In this paper, we will discuss online pedagogical approaches to experiential learning, teaching bio-inspired design concepts, and the integration of these approaches in the engineering design process. Central to the online PD design and function of each course was the use of inquiry, experiential and highly-collaborative learning strategies. Preliminary results show that teachers appreciated the aspects of the summer PD that included exploration, such as during the “Found Object” activity, and the process of building a prototype. These activities represented experiential learning opportunities where teachers were able to learn by doing. It was noted throughout the focus group discussions that such opportunities were appreciated by participating teachers. Teachers indicated that the experiential learning components of the PD allowed them to do something outside of their comfort zone, inspired them to do research that they would not have done outside of this experience, and allowed them to “be in the student's seat and get hands-on application”. By participating in these experiential learning opportunities, teachers were also able to better understand how the BIRDEE curriculum may impact students’ learning in their classrooms