Creating Biologically Inspired Design Units for High School Engineering Courses

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.