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Abstract
During recent years bionics, a new discipline which is in charge with the transfer of the principles of construction, regulation, interaction and organisation of biology into innovative technical solutions, has attracted significant interest from various industries. Based on this request for bionic expertise in engineering, the faculty for teaching engineering in foreign languages (FILS) at ‘Politehnica’ University of Bucharest started a course in bionics in SS 2007, which was supported by the expertise of the German ‚Bionik-Kompetenz-Netz‘, one of the leading organizations in bionics. This is the report on the considerations involved in the course concept, the first experiences with the students' acceptance, some conclusions and future perspectives for extending bionics activities at ‘Politehnica’. Finally, within the last section, the evaluation of a questionnaire, filled in by the students at the end of the course, will be presented. In order to avoid any confusion, considering overlapping or mixing up with other bio-disciplines related to technology, the paper starts with a short introduction, explaining the principles of bionics and providing a clear definition of the field.
Acknowledgement
The work presented in this paper would not have been possible without the kind support of Dr. (DVM) Knut Braun, the coordinator of the BioKoN network at Saarbrücken University and the students at ‘Politehnica’ University of Bucharest, who were accepting and visiting an optional course just because they decided to broaden their horizon, while taking part in a novel teaching experiment. The present paper is partially based on a preliminary presentation of the subject at the International Conference on Engineering Education, September 3–7, 2007 in Coimbra (Portugal). The authors also want to thank the organizers of that conference.