Review #7

Introducing students to bio-inspiration and biomimetic design: a workshop experience

Citation:  Santulli, C., & Langella, C. (2011). Introducing students to bio-inspiration and biomimetic design: a workshop experience. International Journal Of Technology & Design Education, 21(4), 471-485. doi:10.1007/s10798-010-9132-6

Review: The researchers wanted to determine how best to use a bio-inspired approach to designing products.  They used data collected from second-year students at Seconda Universita' de Napoli.  The theme of the students' work was "Bio-inspired design of sport."  The students had been asked to find examples from nature and apply these examples to the design of sporting equipment.  Some examples of this were helmets designed to protect the head almost like having a second skull, ski boots modeled after penguin feathers, and surf boots with grips and materials like the skin of Remora fishes.  The researchers concluded that the project-based exercise was useful to introduce the students to the myriad possibilities of bio-inspiration.  One issue the researchers found was that the university did not offer as much of a multidisciplinary approach as they had hoped, so the result was that students either did not consider all the functions of a biological model or they tried too hard to create an exact replica of the biological counterpart by using too many complicated design features.

Reflection: If you ask me how I feel about teaching on two consecutive days you'll probably get two different answers.  From time to time I miss my old job as a nuclear medicine technologist.  I miss working in fairly quiet environments, having an easier workspace to keep clean and organized, working with high-tech equipment, meeting and caring for the patients, and (of course) the money.  There are things I like better about teaching, like only having to be exposed to artificial blood and body fluids (and that's only artificial urine), getting to show students really cool things we can do to learn more about the function of the body, and (of course) summers off.  Both careers have ample opportunities for learning.  Both fields have requirements that change from year to year, and both have state-mandated unannounced observations, though education has them a lot more frequently.  However, in nuclear medicine, those inspections were brutal!!!

I said all that to say I'm warming up to teaching, even though I still have rotten days.  This could be because it's May 5th, so school will be out in three weeks and I'll have nine weeks off (give or take a day).  On the other hand, maybe it's just a change of attitude.  I hope it's the latter, though I'm sure the former has something to do with it.

As a health science teacher, and for that matter, as a teacher in the US today, I'm frequently told that my students need more rigorous assignments and more real-life type scenarios to help them.  There's a big push for project-based learning, and with that in mind, and also the fact that I just ordered some STEM medals for our health science students who will soon be the first to graduate in the "Biotechnology" pathway, I tried to find an article to give me ideas for ways I could get my students involved in real-life type project assignments.  This article wasn't exactly what I was looking to find, but, I learned something from it.  I learned a new term, bio-inspiration.  It makes perfect sense, though, and I think my mechanical engineering major son would find this a natural fit.  (Hee hee, I'm actually using it myself!)  It also gave me some ideas for how to create, administer, and assign projects for my classes, specifically, the types of questions that the instructors asked of the students.  

Honestly, I believe that more projects should be done this way in design courses because this is what we expect real design engineers to do.  We, as an entire system, have spent a lot of time teaching students how to take tests and memorize facts but we need to teach these students to use their brains.  Evidently, the universities in Italy have not been teaching their design students using a multidisciplinary approach either.  As a former student myself I totally remember and understand why students think, "Why do I have to read and analyze One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest?  I'm going to be a _______________ (insert non-literature-related occupation here)."  On the other hand, now that I'm a teacher, I can help students visualize yellow fever and smallpox and those dread diseases in the novels they're reading downstairs.  It's still important that our future clothing designers have a little bit of background in science, just as our future nurses need a little bit of knowledge of literature and our future mathematicians need an appreciation for the arts.