Overview
Why are things in nature shaped the way they are? How do birds fly? Why do bird nests look the way they do? How do woodpeckers peck? These are the types of questions Dr. Lorna Gibson's freshman seminar at MIT has been investigating. We invite you to explore with us.
Questions such as these are the subject of biomimetic research. When engineers copy the shapes found in nature we call it Biomimetics. The word biomimic comes from bio, as in biology and mimetic, which means to copy.
Join us as we explore and look for answers to why similar shapes occur in so many natural things and how physics change the shape of nature.
Course Web Site
For the Fall 2004 version of the course, the posters, slides and demonstrations were made as part of a service learning freshman seminar at MIT: The Engineering of Birds. Service learning subjects incorporate a community service project into the academic learning experience. In this subject we prepared educational displays on engineering principles related to birds which we gave to the Boston Nature Center and the Museum of Science.
We received additional assistance from: Robyn Allen, a sophomore in Aeronautical and Astronautical Engineering, Matthew Dawson, a graduate student in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Sue Stoessel from the Boston Museum of Science.
The subject was run by Professor Lorna Gibson of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at MIT. Financial support for the 2003 projects was provided by the MIT Alumni Fund for Excellence in Education.