Bio-inspired design (BID) fosters innovations in engineering. Learning BID is crucial for developing multidisciplinary innovation skills
of designers and engineers. Current BID education aims to enhance
learners’ understanding and analogical reasoning skills. However,
it often heavily relies on the teachers’ expertise. When learners
pursue independent learning using some educational tools, they
face challenges in understanding and reasoning practice within
this multidisciplinary field. Additionally, evaluating their learning
outcomes comprehensively becomes problematic. Addressing these
challenges, we introduce a LLMs-driven BID education method
based on a structured ontology and three strategies: enhancing
understanding through LLMs-enpowered "learning by asking", assisting reasoning by providing hints and feedback, and assessing
learning outcomes through benchmarking against existing BID
cases. Implementing the method, we developed BIDTrainer, a BID education tool. User studies indicate that learners using BIDTrainer
understood BID knowledge better, reason faster with higher interactivity than the baseline, and BIDTrainer assessed the learning
outcomes consistent with experts.