In nature, life learns and adapts through relationships – every living system is shaped by its interactions with others and the world around it. A forest exchanges knowledge underground through its mycorrhizal threads, coral reefs build strength through countless tiny collaborations, and a flock of birds finds its direction not by hierarchy, but through connection.
In classrooms and homeschools, we too are living within an age of connection – one shaped not only by digital tools, but by the need to reconnect with the living systems that sustain us. The challenge is no longer to compete with technology, but to design learning that helps children think, observe, and create with it.
Just as ecosystems thrive through feedback and diversity, education can flourish when curiosity, reflection, and creativity flow freely between students, teachers, tools, and place.
Here are four more assignments for primary students that embody that spirit. Each invites children to notice the hidden currents of energy, water, heat, and soil in their own environments, and to explore how we might redesign those systems with nature’s wisdom in mind. This continues the assignments we began in Stop Trying to Block AI. Design Better Assignments Instead.
5. The Energy Detectives
Years 4–7
Traditional assignment: List ways to save energy at home.
AI-era assignment: Form an energy detective team. For one week, investigate energy use in one room at school or home. When is energy being used? When is it wasted? Track it your way, through drawings, charts, tallies, or photos. Interview the people who use that space about their energy habits. Use AI to calculate energy use and research saving strategies. Design three solutions, a quick fix, a medium change, and a big idea. Test your quick fix if possible and report what you learn.
Just as migrating birds follow invisible energy gradients across the sky, students begin to see energy as a flow instead of an abstraction. They learn to notice where it accumulates, where it leaks, and where it’s used well or poorly.
Creativity blooms in their chosen tracking methods – one child might sketch light patterns through the day, another might graph power meter readings, another might colour-code waste points.
Metacognition deepens as they reflect on what they observed, what people told them, and why habits are so hard to change. Higher-order thinking appears as they distinguish between behaviour and system design: should we rely on reminders, or redesign the system so the right choice happens naturally, like a flower opening toward light?
AI can compute, but it cannot observe. Only the students can see that the classroom lights are left on after lunch because the switch is hidden behind a cupboard – or that computers stay on overnight because they take too long to reboot.
Learning outcomes: Data collection, pattern recognition, interviewing, systems thinking, and reflection – understanding the difference between knowing what should happen and understanding why it doesn’t.
6. The Water Wisdom Project
Years 1–4
Traditional assignment: Make a poster about saving water.
AI-era assignment: Become a water tracker! Follow water through one day at school or home. Where does it come from? Where does it go? Draw its journey as a “water map.” Interview someone who knows your local water story – a teacher, parent, or water worker. Use AI for fun facts about water use, then invent three “water wisdom” tips for your school or family. Try one for a week and share your results.
This assignment reveals what rivers and rainfall already know: all things flow. Children often see water as a magical resource that appears and disappears. Mapping its real journey, through taps, drains, pipes, and treatment plants, reconnects them to its living cycle.
Creativity lives in the water map itself, part science, part story, showing the hidden veins beneath their daily life. Metacognition develops as they test their tips, reflect on what worked, and learn why small habits (like turning off taps) succeed while others require system redesign (like fixing leaks).
Higher-order thinking emerges as they trace a whole system from source to sea, learning that the simplest actions ripple outward through complex networks – just as a raindrop in one place can affect a river downstream.
AI can supply statistics, but it cannot follow the actual water through a child’s home, interview a caretaker about leaky pipes, or experience the small wonder of watching rain refill a birdbath.
Learning outcomes: Systems mapping, observation, interviewing, experimentation, and self-reflection – realising that information alone does not change behaviour; understanding does.
7. The Cooling and Heating Challenge
Years 5–7
Traditional assignment: Research renewable energy sources.
AI-era assignment: Investigate the temperature in your school or home. Which rooms are too hot or too cold? When? Collect data for a week, interview the people who control heating and cooling, and research how buildings in other climates stay comfortable using passive design, the art of working with sun, shade, airflow, and materials. Design a solution for one space using as little energy as possible. Build a model or diagram and reflect on what you learned.
Here, children begin to see buildings as living organisms that are breathing, absorbing, and releasing. They discover that comfort can come not from machines, but from design that collaborates with climate, like a cactus storing water or a termite mound self-cooling through airflow.
Creativity thrives in designing context-specific solutions: curtains that trap warmth, vents that draw cool air, and reflective panels that bounce sunlight. Metacognition grows as they analyse their temperature data, notice trade-offs, and reflect on the balance between “smart” technology and simple wisdom.
Higher-order thinking shines in cross-cultural learning: comparing desert dwellings that stay cool with Scandinavian homes that trap heat, and realising both follow the same principle, use form to serve function.
AI can describe thermal mass, but it cannot feel the draft by the window, or notice how the morning sun warms one corner and not another. That level of perception belongs only to living learners.
Learning outcomes: Data analysis, interviewing, cross-cultural learning, appropriate technology assessment, and design modelling – understanding that good design starts with observation, not assumption.
8. The Soil Story Project
Years 3–6
Traditional assignment: Learn about composting.
AI-era assignment: Track what happens to food scraps in your school or home. Where do they go? Interview someone who deals with waste, observe soil in different places, and start a small composting experiment: a jar, a worm bin, or an outdoor pile. Watch what happens over a month. Record your findings and reflect: What changed? What surprised you? How is soil connected to healthy food and a healthy planet?
This assignment brings students into contact with the quiet alchemy of decomposition – nature’s recycling system. Janine Benyus notes that in natural systems, there is no waste; everything becomes “food” for another process.
Creativity lives in the experiment itself – designing, adjusting, troubleshooting. Metacognition grows through observation and reflection: noting the smells, textures, and transformations over time. Higher-order thinking arises as they connect soil health to global systems – realising that what we throw away is part of the same cycle that feeds us.
AI can list the ingredients of soil, but it cannot watch an apple core become humus or feel the crumbly texture of living earth. The learning happens in that tactile, sensory partnership with decay and renewal.
Learning outcomes: Long-term observation, documentation, comparison, understanding decomposition and nutrient cycles, and systems thinking – learning that soil is not dirt, but a living community.
How to Use AI
Across these four projects – energy, water, heat, and soil – children begin to see what nature has always known: that life is built on relationships. Every system connects and responds, exchanging information in loops of feedback and renewal.
When children learn this way, they are not memorising facts about sustainability – they are experiencing it. They begin to recognise that energy is not just electricity but sunlight, movement, and effort; that water is not only what flows from a tap, but part of a living cycle; that warmth and coolness depend not only on machines but on design; and that soil is not dirt, but a breathing, regenerative community beneath our feet.
Technology like AI can support our inquiries, but the truest intelligence still comes from attention – from noticing patterns, asking questions, and engaging the senses. AI can compute data; it cannot feel the breeze through an open window, trace the path of a raindrop, or hear the slow music of compost becoming soil.
When we teach in relationship with nature, learning becomes alive again. Children discover that they are not separate from the systems they study, but participants within them – capable of shaping, restoring, and caring for the world that sustains them.
So, let us continue to design assignments that connect rather than divide, that invite curiosity instead of compliance, and that remind every learner that intelligence is a shared phenomenon, stretching from root to cloud, from child to circuit.
Because education, like life itself, flourishes through connection.
This same thinking carries forward into how we teach in a world of rapid change — see The Fire Beetle Sees What’s Coming: Adaptive Teaching in the Age of AI.
This blog post was produced in part with the assistance of AskNature Chat.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is biomimicry?
Biomimicry is the practice of looking to nature for solutions, then applying what we learn to design and problem-solving. Instead of inventing from scratch, it means studying how plants, animals, and ecosystems have already solved a challenge — like staying cool, collecting water, or absorbing carbon — and adapting that strategy for human use.
How does biomimicry help address climate change?
Nature has been adapting to extreme conditions for billions of years, so many organisms already hold working solutions to problems we now face at a larger scale — cooling buildings without electricity (termite mounds), collecting water in drought (the Namib beetle), protecting coastlines from storms (mangrove roots), and capturing carbon (corals, forests, kelp). Biomimicry means studying those solutions and applying the same principles to human design.
How can children get involved in biomimicry?
Children don’t need special training to think like a biomimicrist — just curiosity and a habit of asking “how does nature solve this?” Simple ways to start include a backyard scavenger hunt for nature’s patterns, a “design-an-animal” challenge for a changing climate, or building a small model (like a passive-cooling structure or a water collector) inspired by something they’ve observed outdoors.
Is biomimicry only for scientists and engineers?
No — biomimicry is as much a mindset as a profession. Anyone can practice it by observing nature closely and asking design questions. Professional biomimicry practitioners apply it in architecture, materials science, and engineering, but the same core skill — careful observation followed by “what if we built it that way?” — is exactly what this post’s classroom and family activities are designed to build in children.
Åsa Jomård
In 2015, Åsa completed a course in Biomimicry: A Sustainable Design Methodology at Minneapolis College of Art and Design. With over 10 years of experience exploring nature for inspiration and as a former member of Ben, Biomimicry Education Network, she brings both academic background and creative teaching experience to her work. Her materials seamlessly integrate stories, nature observations, and design challenges, making them perfect for inquiry-led learning in early primary contexts.