Nature by Design

Students and teachers engaging in a hands-on science experiment with light and optics.

Inspiring the next generation of problem solvers through nature-inspired STEM.

Engineering by Nature inspires students to see themselves as STEM problem solvers. Through hands-on, nature-inspired challenges, students learn from the world around them, test bold ideas, and build the confidence to design creative solutions for real-world problems.

Students engage in nature-inspired sensing experiments at Signal Lab.

Explore how signals move through nature — then design a system that helps others detect, understand, and respond.

Signal Lab is a hands-on STEM challenge where students explore how nature uses light, sound, movement, reflection, pattern, and direction to send information. Students then design and test their own signal system to help others detect, understand, and respond.

Team collaborating on design problem-solving with models and charts.

Investigate real problems. Test bold ideas. Design better solutions.

Problem Solving by Design is a course for students who want to solve problems with creativity, evidence, and purpose. Designed for non-engineering majors, the course helps students investigate real-world challenges, question assumptions, generate solution paths, build and test early ideas, evaluate tradeoffs, and communicate clear recommendations.

Through hands-on studios, team challenges, design reviews, and reflection, students build practical problem-solving skills they can transfer across academic, workplace, community, and technical contexts.

When students click, they enter a macro-to-nano interactive explorer where they zoom from a Morpho b

Interactive Science Explainer

Explore how nature turns structure into signal.

Morpho Butterfly Explorer is an interactive science explainer designed as a preparatory experience for the larger Signal Lab project. Students move through a macro-to-nano investigation of Morpho butterfly wings, beginning with the butterfly as a visible biological signal, zooming into the wing surface, and then exploring the nanoscale ridge-and-lamellae structures that create blue structural color through light interference.

The experience connects physics, chemistry, biology, and engineering design in a compact digital exhibit. Students examine how reflected light acts as a signal, how chitin and air gaps create material effects without pigment, how receivers interpret visual information, and how natural structures can inspire engineered signaling systems. Each hotspot includes an image-supported explanation, a design takeaway, and a prompt that asks students to apply the concept to their own Signal Lab design.

As part of the full Signal Lab, this module helps students understand that signals are not just messages; they are systems made of a sender, signal, receiver, context, and meaning. The explorer supports the design phase by giving students concrete biological and physical principles they can borrow, such as repetition, contrast, angle-dependent visibility, filtering, structural color, and biomimicry. It also includes science lenses, teacher-facing standards alignment, and a design-check tool to help students transfer what they learned into their own original signal prototypes.

Macro-to-Nano Explorer

When students click, they enter a macro-to-nano interactive explorer where they zoom from a Morpho butterfly to its wing surface and then into the nanoscale structures that create its brilliant blue signal.

Click to Explore

Signal Lab Vocabulary Quest Game

Build the language of science through play.

Signal Lab Vocabulary Quest is an interactive STEM vocabulary game that helps students practice key terms from the Signal Lab learning ecosystem through matching, sorting, image-based challenges, and scientific explanation writing. The game supports vocabulary development across signal systems, signal quality, light and color, engineering design, and evidence-based reasoning.

Students receive scaffolds, live progress feedback, corrective explanations, sound effects, reward animations, fireworks, and animal-themed badges as they complete each level. Designed as a reusable template, the game can be adapted quickly for future Signal Lab explorers or other science vocabulary sets.

Signal Lab Custom Assessment Builder

Part of the Signal Lab learning ecosystem

The Signal Lab Assessment Builder is a customizable teacher-facing tool designed to help educators quickly create high-quality, student-ready assessments for interactive science explorers and project-based STEM learning. Built as part of the broader Signal Lab learning ecosystem, the builder helps teachers move from exploration to measurable learning by generating assessments aligned to phenomena-based science instruction, modeling, evidence-based reasoning, engineering design, and transfer.

Teachers can select from a flexible menu of assessment types, including phenomenon-based explanation, multi-component task sets, model-based assessment, CER writing, engineering design challenges, transfer tasks, embedded formative checks, digital evidence logs, peer review, revision, and design defense. As teachers make selections, the tool instantly generates a student-facing assessment preview, a teacher planning view, a teacher guide, and copy-ready text for use in an LMS or classroom document.

The builder is designed to support real classroom implementation. Teachers can customize the explorer focus, phenomenon or design problem, time frame, point value, work mode, evidence requirements, rubric style, student choice options, and accessibility supports. Preset bundles allow teachers to quickly generate common assessment formats such as an exit ticket, one-day explorer check, design planning task, full performance assessment, portfolio artifact, or advanced extension.

The assessment system also includes classroom-ready supports such as sentence starters, vocabulary banks, success checklists, structured peer review forms, model revision tables, teacher facilitation notes, and teacher look-fors. These features help students organize their thinking while supporting teachers with clearer expectations for scoring and feedback.

Within Signal Lab, the builder closes the loop between interactive exploration and student learning evidence. Students use the explorers to observe biological signal systems, then use the assessments to explain mechanisms, cite evidence, model system relationships, identify failure points, and transfer biological principles into engineered solutions. This creates a coherent pathway from observe → explain → model → design → revise → defend.

As a portfolio artifact, the Signal Lab Assessment Builder demonstrates the design of a scalable instructional system rather than a standalone activity. It shows how interactive media, assessment design, accessibility, teacher workflow, and NGSS-aligned performance tasks can work together to support meaningful, classroom-ready STEM learning.

Try the Assessment Builder

Course & Program Overview Videos

Explore how information moves through nature — then design a signal system that helps others detect, understand, and respond.

Signal systems are fascinating because they show how information moves through the world — through light, sound, movement, reflection, pattern, and direction. In Signal Lab, students discover how nature communicates, then use those ideas to design systems that help others detect, understand, and respond.

Problem Solving by Design

Problem Solving by Design is an interdisciplinary college course concept for non-engineering majors that teaches practical, transferable problem-solving skills through scenario-based studios, team challenges, low-fidelity prototyping, critique, and reflection. The course helps students investigate real-world problems, test assumptions, evaluate constraints and risks, generate multiple solution paths, and communicate evidence-based recommendations.

Challenge Cards

Signal Lab Challenge Cards are reusable, student-facing design prompts that help teams move from inspiration to action. Each card introduces a nature-inspired model, such as bat echolocation, and turns it into a hands-on design mission with clear connections to signals, physics, testing, troubleshooting, and reflection.

Within the broader Engineering by Nature program, the cards support the transition from learning about natural communication systems to designing original signal systems. Students use the cards alongside the Team Design Mat, kit materials, and testing stations to define a problem, choose a signal or cue, build a model, test it with peers, and improve their design based on evidence.

Engineering by Nature: Learning Media & Program Videos

A bat paints the dark with sound — and reads the echoes to find its way.

Bat echolocation works because sound travels as waves. A bat sends out high-pitched sound waves, and those waves move through the air until they hit an object. When the sound waves hit a branch, wall, insect, or other obstacle, they reflect back as echoes. The bat detects the returning echoes and uses the information to figure out where the object is, how far away it is, and whether the path ahead is clear.
This connects to NGSS physics ideas about waves and information transfer: waves can travel through materials, reflect off surfaces, and carry information from one place to another. In echolocation, the outgoing sound wave is the signal, the object reflects the signal, and the returning echo gives the bat information it can use to navigate.

Tiny flashes. Hidden patterns. A message written in light.

Firefly signaling works because light can carry information. A firefly sends out flashes of light in a specific timing pattern. Another firefly detects the light, recognizes the pattern, and interprets what the signal may mean, such as location, identity, or readiness to respond.

This connects to NGSS physics ideas about waves and information transfer. Light is a type of electromagnetic radiation, and wave-based signals can be used to send, receive, and interpret information. In firefly signaling, the flashing light is the signal, the pattern carries information, and the receiver uses that pattern to understand and respond.

Tiny structures bend light into color — turning wings into signals.

Butterfly wing colors work because light interacts with tiny surface structures. When light reaches a butterfly wing, microscopic scales and ridges can reflect, scatter, or shift the way the light appears. This can create bright colors, visible patterns, or shimmering optical effects that help with recognition, signaling, camouflage, warning, or attracting attention.

This connects to NGSS physics ideas about waves and electromagnetic radiation. Light is a type of electromagnetic radiation, and when it interacts with matter, it can be reflected, absorbed, scattered, or changed in appearance. In butterfly wings, the wing surface affects how light is seen, so the pattern and color can carry visual information to a receiver.

Detect what you can’t see — using sound, echoes, and smart d

Bat Echolocation Challenge Card

The Bat Echolocation Challenge Card is a reusable, student-facing design prompt for Signal Lab. It introduces students to bat echolocation as a nature-inspired model for obstacle detection.

Students learn that bats send out high-pitched sound waves, which travel through the air, reflect off nearby objects, and return as echoes. Those echoes help bats detect where objects are, how far away they are, whether they are moving, and whether the path ahead is clear.

In the design challenge, students use this natural model to create a system that helps someone detect an obstacle without seeing it directly. Their model may use sound, echo, reflection, or another cue to communicate that an object is nearby.

How it fits into Signal Lab

This card is used after students explore nature-inspired communication systems and before they begin team design work. It helps students connect a real biological sensing system to a hands-on engineering design challenge.

Students use the card with the Team Design Mat, kit materials, peer testing, and reflection prompts to:

define the sender, signal, receiver, and meaning
choose a signal or cue
plan and build a model
test the model with another team
troubleshoot and revise based on feedback
explain how their design uses physics and nature-inspired thinking

Learning focus

This challenge supports student understanding of:

sound waves
reflection
echoes
direction
distance
signal strength
obstacle detection
sender, signal, receiver, and meaning
evidence-based testing and iteration

Student thinking prompt

How could your design help someone detect an obstacle without seeing it directly?

More Signal Lab Interactive Explorers

Bat Echolocation Explorer

Bat Echolocation Explorer is an interactive science experience where students investigate how bats use sound waves and returning echoes to navigate and locate prey. Learners explore the sender, signal, receiver, echo timing, and sound-wave behavior behind echolocation, then apply those ideas to their own Signal Lab design.

Firefly Signal Explorer

Firefly Signals Explorer is an interactive science experience where students investigate how fireflies use light patterns to communicate. Learners explore the sender, signal, receiver, flash timing, and bioluminescent chemistry behind firefly communication, then apply those ideas to their own Signal Lab design.

Nature by Design

Inspiring the next generation of problem solvers through nature-inspired STEM.

Explore how signals move through nature — then design a system that helps others detect, understand, and respond.

Investigate real problems. Test bold ideas. Design better solutions.

Hummingbird Signal Exploer

Himmingbird Signal Explorer with Deep Engineering and Science Modes