Using Biomimicry Fundamentals to Teach Systems/Design Thinking and STEM Concepts

It is well known that engineering involves integrating broad knowledge towards some purpose, generally to address a need or solve a problem. Undergraduate STEM education must train students to not only solve engineering challenges that transcend disciplinary boundaries, but also communicate, transfer knowledge, and collaborate across technical and non-technical boundaries. One approach to achieving this goal is teaching biomimicry or bio-inspired design in an engineering curriculum. Bio-inspired design encourages learning from nature to generate innovative designs for man-made technical challenges that are more economic, efficient and sustainable than ones conceived entirely from first principles. The inherently interdisciplinary topic provides an interesting approach to framing systems or design thinking and STEM concepts in an engineering curriculum. Additionally, biomimicry touches on many areas of engineering including electrical, mechanical, materials, biomedical, chemical, manufacturing and systems, which makes it applicable in a wide range of engineering programs, from discipline-specific to general ones. For undergraduate education, incorporation of other STEM disciplines into complex engineering problems will provide a new context for students to apply knowledge that they already have. Most students that go into engineering have high school level training in biology. Adding biomimicry into the engineering curriculum encourages students to utilize and build off their prior knowledge, which fosters making connections and recognizing interrelationships across STEM disciplines. Moreover, requiring knowledge transfer across domains as well as organizing that knowledge into logical constructs helps to develop adaptive problem solving skills that will facilitate innovation. Having to retrieve and transfer knowledge from domains outside of engineering forces students to adapt to unfamiliar languages and content formats (which addresses non-technical skills) in order to apply the biological information intelligently to engineering problems (which addresses technical skills). Biomimicry can improve students’ STEM literacy and understanding, cross-disciplinary thinking, and creativity and innovation skills. In this paper we discuss the fundamentals of teaching systems/design thinking and STEM concepts with biomimicry with an emphasis on making connections between biological systems and the engineering through the use of abstractions and analogies