Investigation of the effect of teaching supported with biomimicry activities in the interaction of light with matter unit of the 7th-grade science course

This study aimed to investigate the effects of teaching the interaction of light with matter unit in 7th-grade science course using biomimicry-designed activities on students' academic achievement, motivation for science, and attitudes toward science. Another aim of the study was to examine the impact of the biomimicry-designed activities on students' opinions on the course. For this purposes, 42 students studying at a state secondary school in Seydiler district of Kastamonu province in the second semester of the 2023-2024 academic year constituted the study group of the study. There are 21 students each in the randomly selected experimental and control groups. The mixed research method, in which quantitative and qualitative research are used together, was used in the study. The quantitative data of the study were collected with the light-matter interaction unit academic achievement test, science course attitude scale, and motivation scale for learning science, and the qualitative data were collected with the semi-structured interview form. In the study, a pre-test post-test control group quasi-experimental design, one of the experimental research methods, was used to determine the effects of teaching with biomimicry-designed activities on students' academic achievement, motivation, and attitude towards science course. In addition, qualitative data were collected with a semi-structured interview form to obtain the opinions of nine students from the experimental group, determined according to their academic achievement post-test scores, regarding the activities designed with biomimicry used in learning the relevant unit topics and the course. While the relevant unit topics were taught to the control group students with the 2018 Science Course Curriculum, the students in the experimental group were taught with activities designed with biomimicry in addition to the current curriculum. Quantitative data obtained from the measurement tools used in the study were analyzed with SPSS program, and the content analysis method was used in the analysis of qualitative data. Because of the analysis of the data, a statistically significant difference was found in the academic achievement and motivation of the students in the experimental group compared to the students in the control group, while no statistically significant difference was found between the groups in their attitudes towards the science course. According to the data obtained from the semi-structured interview form applied to nine students selected from the experimental group, it was determined that the science course positively developed the students' perspectives on technology and engineering, and that they had opinions that the living things in their environment affected their imagination and creativity. In addition, they stated that they learned the subjects better with the biomimicry-based activities they used while learning the relevant unit topics in science courses. Based on these results, it is recommended that biomimicry-based applications be used more in the teaching of appropriate unit topics in science courses.