Doctoral candidate Thea Lautenschläger wins BMBF university competition.


SUMMARY IN ENGLISH

Beech leaves and sun shades

A project group at the Chair for Botany is developing a bionics experiment kit for schools. Many inventions were inspired by nature: Velcro®, for example, is modelled on burdock, and the properties of lotus leaves gave rise to the idea of developing self-cleaning surfaces. Learning from nature: that is the guiding principle of bionics. Convinced that this approach could be of great interest to young people, a project group at the TU Dresden is developing new teaching material. The area of bionics is particularly relevant to natural scientists and engineers, but also to architects, designers and philosophers. Thanks to its interdisciplinarity, bionics lends itself to practical, cross-subject teaching activities. One example is the experiment module "Folding techniques in nature and technology", in which pupils first examine the buds of different plants and describe the way the leaves or petals are folded together and rolled up. The chaos of the folds contains a certain order. In addition to the practical exercises, the students learn how insights about these regularities have found practical application - for example in space travel.

Contact: Thea Lautenschläger,
phone: +49 351/46334150,
e-mail: thea.lautenschlaeger@tu-dresden.de,
TU Dresden, Chair for Botany,
further information (in German)" 
further information about all the winning projects"