Designing Biomimetic Robots

Designing Biomimetic Robots was funded by the NSF STEM+Computing program and conducted in partnership with TERC and middle school teachers in New England and Maryland. We developed an interdisciplinary curriculum in which middle school students students explore biological structure-function relationships and use what they learn to design, build, program, test, and iterate on robots in response to disaster engineering design challenges. Visit the project page here.

The project worked in multiple states, in urban and suburban school districts with diverse student demographics. Over 3 years, we worked with 22 middle school teachers and nearly 800 students.  Our specific research activities were guided by the overarching question: How does the BioRobots learning environment support student engagement in interdisciplinary learning?