New Educational Tools and Curriculum Enhancements for Motivating Engineering Students to Design and Realize Bio-Inspired Products

The use of bio-inspiration to create new products and devices requires the development of new design tools and manufacturing technologies, as well as the education of students capable of using them. At the University of Maryland, we have developed new educational tools that emphasize bioinspired product realization. These tools include the development of a bioinspired design repository, a concurrent fabrication and assembly technology that focuses on the use of multi-piece, multi-stage molds to affordably manufacture large numbers of bio-inspired products, and a series of undergraduate curriculum enhancements. This paper provides an overview of these two technologies and describes how these technologies are integrated into the Mechanical Engineering curriculum. The new educational tools provide students with the fundamental design and manufacturing principles needed in bio-inspired product and device development. The curriculum changes culminate in an elective course undertaken in their senior year.