Yeter Ibrahim H, Tan Valerie Si Qi, Le Ferrand Hortense
National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University, 1 Nanyang Walk, Singapore 637616, Singapore.
School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, 50 Nanyang Avenue, Singapore 639798, Singapore.
Biomimetics (Basel). 2023 Mar 17;8(1):125. doi: 10.3390/biomimetics8010125.
Biomimicry is an interdisciplinary design approach that provides solutions to engineering problems by taking inspiration from nature. Given the established importance of biomimicry for building a sustainable world, there is a need to develop effective curricula on this topic. In this study, a workshop was conducted twice in Singapore: once with 14 students from a local high school in Singapore, and once with 11 undergraduate students in engineering from the United States. The workshop aimed to better understand how students conceptualize biomimicry following the bottom-up and top-down biomimetic methods. The workshop contained a lecture and laboratory session, and data were collected via questionnaires, field observation, and participant presentations at the end of the laboratory session. A qualitative analysis revealed that the top-down biomimetic approach was initially understood using vague and generic terms. In contrast, the students described the bottom-up approach using precise and technical vocabulary. By naming the themes highlighting the students' conceptualizations, it was concluded that strengthening the principle that makes the natural object unique and increasing interdisciplinary knowledge are needed to help them perform the top-down approach. The results from this work should be confirmed with a more significant number of participants, and they could help develop a curriculum to teach the two approaches effectively by providing tools to help the students generalize their ideas and abstract meaning from systems.
仿生学是一种跨学科的设计方法，它通过从自然界获取灵感来为工程问题提供解决方案。鉴于仿生学对于建设可持续发展世界的既定重要性，有必要开发关于这一主题的有效课程。在本研究中，在新加坡举办了两次工作坊：一次是与来自新加坡当地一所高中的14名学生，另一次是与来自美国的11名工程专业本科生。该工作坊旨在更好地了解学生如何按照自下而上和自上而下的仿生方法来概念化仿生学。工作坊包括一次讲座和一次实验室课程，并且在实验室课程结束时通过问卷调查、实地观察和参与者展示来收集数据。定性分析表明，自上而下的仿生方法最初是用模糊和通用的术语来理解的。相比之下，学生们用精确和专业的词汇描述自下而上的方法。通过命名突出学生概念化的主题，得出结论：需要强化使自然物体独特的原理并增加跨学科知识，以帮助他们运用自上而下的方法。这项工作的结果应该用更多数量的参与者来加以验证，并且它们可以通过提供工具来帮助学生从系统中概括他们的想法和抽象意义，从而有助于开发一门有效地教授这两种方法的课程。
