This engineering education research project focuses on using bio-inspired design--i.e. using nature as an inspiration to design--in order to teach innovation to mechanical engineering students. The research focuses on best practices to teach engineers to draw on nature for inspiration in design. The research will be integrated into the curriculum by establishing a certificate program at Texas A&M University. Students who wish to obtain the certificate take selected electives, at the cost of one additional credit hour in the program. To measure the impact on the project on student learning, both quantitative and qualitative longitudinal assessments are planned throughout students' collegiate experience and certificate activities. This project should better inform what learning approaches successfully address innovation, and test whether bio-inspired design is an effective pedagogy. The project may also make mechanical engineering a more approachable and attractive subject to students who are traditionally under-represented in engineering.
This research aims to discover how to effectively teach innovation through bioinspired design to engineering students. Designs based on biological analogies offer a rich source of design inspiration. The four-year grant follows cohorts of students, one consisting of students interested in bioinspired design and the other containing undergraduates following Texas A&M’s traditional mechanical engineering curriculum. For one of the major goals of the project, an undergraduate technical elective course was introduced to formally teach different methods of bioinspired design such as the directed method, AskNature, case study based bioinspired design, BioTRIZ, and functionally based design. This course allows the comparison of the five different approaches, and the opportunity to evaluate the effectiveness of the material to increase students’ design self-efficacy and idea generation abilities. Another major goal is to track performance of one cohort of mechanical engineering undergrad over the four years as they progress from freshman to seniors. Assessments were planned throughout the students’ collegiate experience to measure changes in the students’ design self-efficacy and design creativity over the course of an engineering program using four standard metrics of creativity - quantity, quality, novelty, and variety. This study has two parts: The first, a within-subjects longitudinal study, analyzes and compares the results students who have generated solutions for the same design problem during their freshman and senior years. In the second study, a between-groups study, we compare the average results of students in different years of study (freshmen, sophomores, juniors, and seniors). The 4-year longitudinal study examined the impact of a mechanical engineering design curriculum on student’s subjective perception of their engineering design skill, as well as objective measures of creativity. Within the context of this curriculum, we also examined how biologically inspired design affects student creativity. Across the cohort, we note the curriculum resulted in statistically significant greater self-efficacy and expectation of success, while reducing anxiety and maintaining motivation. Overall, these are very positive results. When analyzing creativity, we assessed changes in the quantity of ideas, and variety and novelty of solutions, all of which increased significantly over the four years. We also assessed the average quality and number of high quality solutions, which decreased over time. This results from seniors producing more novel ideas and a greater variety of solutions than freshmen, which were not necessarily high quality. We believe this is a result of an increase in breadth of engineering concepts, as well as greater confidence and risk-taking. Within the context of biologically inspired design, we discovered that each method we investigated provided solutions, and was found to be useful by at least some students. Differences in performance between methods suggests that while each method provides some uplift in particular aspects student performance, no one method proved superior throughout, suggesting that a combination of methods should be pursued.
