Eyes Toward Tomorrow Program Enhancing Collaboration, Connections, and Community Using Bioinspired Design

Abstract

The goal of our i4’s Toward Tomorrow Program is to enrich the future workforce with STEM by providing students with an early, inspirational, interdisciplinary experience fostering inclusive excellence. We attempt to open the eyes of students who never realized how much their voice is urgently needed by providing an opportunity for involvement, imagination, invention, and innovation. Students see how what they are learning, designing, and building matters to their own life, community, and society. Our program embodies convergence by obliterating artificially created, disciplinary boundaries to go far beyond STEM or even STEAM by including artists, designers, social scientists, and entrepreneurs collaborating in diverse teams using scientific discoveries to create inventions that could shape our future. Our program connects two recent revolutions by amplifying Bioinspired Design with the Maker Movement and its democratizing effects empowering anyone to innovate and change the world. Our course is founded in original discovery. We explain the process of biological discovery and the importance of scaling, constraints, and complexity in selecting systems for bioinspired design. By spotlighting scientific writing and publishing, students become more science literate, learn how to decompose a biology research paper, extract the principles, and then propose a novel design by analogy. Using careful, early scaffolding of individual design efforts, students build the confidence to interact in teams. Team building exercises increase self-efficacy and reveal the advantages of a diverse set of minds. Final team video and poster project designs are presented in a public showcase. Our program forms a student-centered creative action community comprised of a large-scale course, student-led classes, and a student-created university organization. The program structure facilitates a community of learners that shifts the students' role from passive knowledge recipients to active co-constructors of knowledge being responsible for their own learning, discovery, and inventions. Students build their own shared database of discoveries, classes, organizations, research openings, internships, and public service options. Students find next step opportunities so they can see future careers. Description of our program here provides the necessary context for our future publications on assessment that examine 21st century skills, persistence in STEM, and creativity.

The Natural Robotics Contest: crowdsourced biomimetic design

“…Nature is a fantastic entry-point for teaching [7]; almost everyone has an intuitive sense for animal behaviour and locomotion from watching anything from movies to pets, pigeons, squirrels and other ubiquitous wildlife, even without realizing it. What is often needed is simply a way to think about what is already subconsciously known.…”