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 work-based authentic problems presented in the unit, which encouraged collaboration.

This innovative practice work in progress paper presents the Biologically Inspired Design for Engineering Education (BIRDEE) 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 are 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 greater engagement 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.

Biologically inspired design perhaps is one of the most important movements in engineering design. The paradigm espouses use of analogies to biology in generating conceptual designs for new technologies. In this paper, we briefly summarize some empirical findings about biologically inspired design, and then develop an information-processing theory of creative analogies in biologically inspired design. We also compare our theory with similar theories. In addition, we examine how biologically inspired design is fundamentally different from other design paradigms.

An important issue in teaching interdisciplinary biologically inspired design is the external representations we use to foster understanding of biological systems. In this study we explore if functional models of biological systems, and in particular Structure-Behavior-Function (SBF) models, enable humans to better understand complex biological systems. The study compares the use of SBF models in answering questions about biological systems versus the use of textual, tabular and graphical representations. The results indicate that while no one representation is best for answering all types of questions, SBF models enable more accurate answers to questions entailing abstract and complex inferences.

Biologically inspired design uses cross-domain analogies from biology to engineering to enhance design creativity and innovation. This analogical transfer requires conceptual understanding of biological systems. In this paper, we describe a prototype interactive knowledge-based design environment called DANE for supporting conceptual understanding through learning about functional models of biological designs. We present initial results from deploying DANE in an interdisciplinary class on biologically inspired design, indicating that designers found DANE's functional models useful for conceptualizing complex systems.

Analogy is a fundamental process of creativity. Biologically inspired design by definition entails cross-domain analogies, and in practice has led to many innovative designs. Thus, biological inspired design is an ideal domain for studying creative analogies. In this paper, we describe an intricate episode of biologically inspired design that unfolded over an extended period of time. We then analyze the episode in terms of Why, What, How and When questions of analogy. This analysis provides a content theory of creative analogies in biologically inspired design.