Improving students' ability to generate solutions to engineering problems through observing nature

Engineers are increasingly looking for inspiration in the design of structures and processes to solve problems in engineering practice.Bioinspired design uses nature as the influence and inspiration for creating and improving designs.Through its application, bioinspired design has a long and expanding influence on human technology.As a reflection of this impact, more and more engineering colleges are incorporating bioinspired design into their curricula.Starting in the fall of 2020 the Texas Tech University (TTU) Whitacre College of Engineering revamped their first-year engineering curriculum by including ENGR 1320-Bioinspired Design for Engineers.ENGR 1320 is taught by a biology professor and designed to help students better understand the natural systems and processes that lead to adaptive solutions and to give them a foundation of the application of biomimicry across engineering disciplines.Within this understanding, students learn to evaluate, problem-solve, and create in an interdisciplinary setting that integrates biology with engineering.Interdisciplinary courses within engineering and STEM curricula have often been boons to increasing students' critical thinking skills and creativity.From this standpoint, an honors section of ENGR 1320 was analyzed during the fall of 2023.This analysis will discuss class observations made by the instructor and an in-class observer, reflections from the students following the course, and linguistic analysis of student work assignments.Per observations and student reflections, at the beginning of the semester, most students were unaware of the concept of bringing Biology and Engineering together, but later in the semester, their attitude toward nature for potential design solutions changed.This change lends itself to more nature-based, sustainable, and creative solutions.Linguistic analysis of student work assignments is a work-in-progress.Linguistic, Inquiry, and Word Count (LIWC-22) was used to show the changes in summary measures of: Analytical Thinking, Clout, Authenticity, and Emotional Tone for student work assignments.Along with these summary measures, LIWC-22 along with Creativity Keyword Dictionaries were used to baseline creativity of the student work assignments.Based on the analytical thinking framework developed in ENGR 1320 that promotes logical, engineering-based thinking with biological thinking, results for the linguistic analysis showed gains in creativity-based summary factors.These results align with the observations seen in-class and from student reflections.