Billy Almon:
And it’s really this ancestral practice that we as humans have been performing since time immemorial, that the indigenous people have perfected this since the dawn of time that has become a way to look at how to not only solve problems, but innovate by looking at how organisms in the natural world solve challenges that are parallel to challenges that we face at the human scale.

Matthew Worwood:
Hello, everyone. My name is Dr. Matthew Worwood.

Cyndi Burnett:
And my name is Dr. Cindy Burnett.

Matthew Worwood:
This is the Fueling Creativity in Education podcast.

Cyndi Burnett:
On this podcast, we’ll be talking about various creativity topics and how they relate to the field of education.

Matthew Worwood:
We’ll be talking with scholars, educators, and resident experts about their work, challenges they face, and exploring new perspectives of creativity.

Cyndi Burnett:
All with a goal to help fuel a more rich and inform discussion that provides teachers, administrators, and emerging scholars with the information they need to infuse creativity into teaching and learning.

Matthew Worwood:
So let’s begin.

Cyndi Burnett:
How can educators use biomimicry and storytelling to spark curiosity, deepen engagement, and inspire the next generation of problem solvers? If you’re looking for creative strategies to transform learning, whether you’re an educator, a designer, or just someone passionate about innovation, this conversation with our guest is filled with insights you won’t want to miss.

Matthew Worwood:
Because today we welcome to the show Billy Allman. Now, Billy is an astrobio futurist, a nature inspired inventor, and a former creative director at Walt Disney Imagineering. He co hosts Little Giants on Animal Planet and Discovery Plus. While exploring biomimicry’s role in innovation through his work in biomimicry, design and storytelling, Billy helps educators and students alike reimagine learning through creativity, curiosity, and world building. Whether it’s his dream and Adapt framework or his innovative approach to STEM education, Billy is on a mission to empower the next generation to think bigger, dream bolder, and solve real world challenges. Billy, welcome to the show.

Billy Almon:
Thank you guys. Thank you for having me. I’m excited for us to have this conversation.

Matthew Worwood:
So, Billy, we got to get into it a little bit. You know, I want to obviously talk a little bit about the world building in the classroom. But before we begin, tell us a little bit about that title, Astro Bio Futurist. Where did it come from? How did you land there? And perhaps if you can, how it connects to what you’re doing for stem Learning in education.

Billy Almon:
Yeah, so the. The title came from, funny enough, literally one. One day I was talking with my wife about goals and aspirations, ambitions for the future, and also just looking at the work that I was currently doing and the types of conversations I was having and the kinds of things that people were asking me to help them think around. And I wrote in a notebook, space exploration, biomimicry. And a lot of the things that I had learned in terms of dreaming up new possibilities and new futures from my time with imagineering, like thinking big and making those big things a reality, and the practice of looking out 5, 10, 20 years into the future and kind of trying to kind of reverse engineer one of those big goals or aspirations out on the horizon. So what I wound up with were these three words of like, okay, space, astro biomimicry, bio. And then futurism, you know, the, the imagineering, imaginative, creative work. And then my wife said, that’s it.

Billy Almon:
Like, that’s what you do. It is. That’s who you are. You are an astro bio futurist. And then she posted it on LinkedIn and I was like, oh, okay. So what’s cool about it though, is that it’s really helped clarify for a lot of people the idea of how you can be more than one thing that you love about yourself and your work. And for me, how so many interesting insights and solutions reside at the intersection of those different things when you actually cross reference them and apply that lens to different challenges.

Matthew Worwood:
And I was going to start on this, but just listening to that story, you can see that you’re thinking a little bit differently. Right. Like, it’s, this is who I am and I don’t quite fit in and I’ve got all these different interests and skill sets and I’ve got to try and bring them together in such a way that I actually have to invent a new word to describe what it is that I do. And to that point, to educators, you know, you’ve described yourself as the favorite D student, right?

Billy Almon:
Yeah.

Matthew Worwood:
So tell us a little bit about what that means, because I feel, my gut feeling is there’s a connection to be had here.

Billy Almon:
Yeah. So I love to talk to educators. And when I, when I always talk to them, I always tell them that if you think about your classroom, I guarantee you I will bet money on it, that you have one D student that you absolutely love that drives you crazy. But you’re rooting for them. Right. They’re saying snarky comments in your classroom. They might be, you know, interrupting while you’re talking, but deep down you love them and you believe in them and like, they’re the ones who keep you up at night, but you know that they have something special in them. And I know that you guys, you know, recently had Dr.

Billy Almon:
Floyd on your program, and she was kind of talking about these gifted students. And, you know, I didn’t recognize those things as gifts at the time, but I definitely match the profile of, you know, the disruptive student who sees things a little bit differently and also isn’t. Isn’t afraid to disrupt the class a little bit to get a chuckle, but also make a point. And that was my thing. So. Yeah, and I bring that up because in identifying those students and me kind of trying to, again, the astro biofuturist part, me trying to show them I’m here talking to you as an extrapolation of that student’s potential. So, you know, there’s a reason why you, as an educator, haven’t given up on them. And the things that I’ve been blessed to do are a promise of what’s to come for them if you continue to invest in them and believe in them.

Cyndi Burnett:
Hmm. I love that so much. Billi and I wonder if you could give any more advice to educators in terms of cultivating the creativity in students that were the d students who have lots of delightful questions and sometimes get into a little bit of trouble. What helped support you throughout the process?

Billy Almon:
You know, for me, it was the teachers who. I shouldn’t say this, but, like, this continued on through college, right? So I, you know, I even had some of my favorite professors who would say, you know, I had one professor in our architecture program at Howard, and I was the student who. I always had great ideas, but I just never stuck to one because I. I would think of, like, another thing and that would keep me from finishing my projects. And so I. I had one professor who would always be like, oh, Billy, he was from Jamaica, he’s from the Islands, and he had a Jamaican accent. And now I’m going to ruin it. So I’m not going to do it because this is audio, right?

Matthew Worwood:
I would love you to do it, but, okay.

Billy Almon:
He would look at my project and he would say, oh, Billy, I don’t think you’re going to make it.

Matthew Worwood:
Right.

Billy Almon:
But he was also the one who would encourage me and give me a different perspective about how I was going about doing things. And for me, it was always those teachers who were honest with me that, for me, was an indicator that they cared and that they weren’t, you know, going through the motions or they weren’t lying to me. Right. And so, you know, just the honest feedback of where I am in the process, for me was a benchmark of like, okay, clearly I could find out that I’m not gonna make it by the time I get the grade on this. Or I could have someone who cares enough about me tell me where I am in the process to at the very least help me try to get across the finish line. And so many different teachers. My English teacher, you know, shout out to Ms. Davis.

Billy Almon:
I had a great AP psychology professor who I wound up getting a scholarship in his class because, again, I was the disruptive student. But in his class, in the psychology class, I had no shame about asking questions because I was just so curious about what I was learning about how the mind works. So I think it was all those professors who were honest with me, but would also allow me to be curious and would kind of invest in my curiosity during the coursework. Those two things really show to me that they cared about who I was and they saw something in me that they were willing to invest in.

Cyndi Burnett:
Thank you for sharing that perspective, Billy. Now, I want to talk a little bit about the bio in your astrobio futurists, because one of the things, and I found you on LinkedIn, one of the things that struck me about your bio was biomimicry, funny enough, and I’ve had some training in biomimicry, but it’s not a process that we’ve talked at all about on our podcast. And we’re now 120 interviews in, and we haven’t had anyone talk about biomimicry. And so I would love for you to share a little bit about biomimicry, what it is to you and how you brought it into education.

Billy Almon:
Yeah, I love talking about biomimicry. So biomimicry comes from the Greek. It was a term coined by a woman named Janine Benyus, and it comes from the Greek bios, meaning life, and mimesis meaning to imitate. So the idea is to imitate life. And it’s really this ancestral practice that we as humans have been performing since time immemorial, that the indigenous people have perfected this since the dawn of time, that has become a way to look at how to not only solve problems, but innovate by looking at how organisms in the natural world solve challenges that are parallel to challenges that we face at the human scale. And then in looking at the solutions and the adaptations that they’ve come up with to address these challenges as best we can, imitating those solutions at the human scale to solve our own problems in efficient and sustainable and innovative ways. So it’s such a really rich way to look at the world, to understand nature. You know, the idea of looking at nature as a living library of technology and innovation.

Billy Almon:
If you remember the first Matrix film, at the end of the film, there’s this moment where the protagonist Neo, he stands up and he looks down this hallway at these antagonists and he sees the code that kind of has overwritten them, and he sees all of these hidden layers. And that’s how I now get to view and help other people view the natural world. All of these secret answers and solutions and really creative ways to not only view, but apply solutions to the real world. And we get to tap into those things now and inherently make our solutions more sustainable. In doing so, I just want to.

Matthew Worwood:
Kind of go off on a little bit of a sidebar here. We spoke a little bit about the show and we shared stories about Wild Kratz and us as parents. And quite often when we have or I’ve had conversations or tried to express through blog articles the value of young children interacting with nature. Because practically everywhere you look at whatever season it is, there is opportunities for you to in essence, ignite curiosity and wonder about the world around you. One of the things that I like a lot is that you’re reminding us to actually look at these as creative acts. And I think Steven Johnson, in his book Where Do Good Ideas Come From? May have actually referenced, starts off the book talking a little bit about the Great Barrier Reefs as being really creative places for creativity. But I’ve got a question for you. Why do you think we stop like it in some ways, couldn’t we continue doing that? Because I know I found it really fascinating as an adult kind of like reliving these experiences with my children in nature.

Matthew Worwood:
But like, as you’re learning about biomimic mimicry, for example, in let’s. I’m just throwing out there, 9th grade science class, why aren’t we actually going and taking the kids out of school, even if it’s in the playground behind us and engaging more with nature? What. What’s stopping us? And you know, what might be the value of that if we can kind of like keep that connection to nature all the way through our lives and not let it disappear?

Billy Almon:
Man, I. Oh, that’s such a great question. I love that question so much. With so many things, there’s no one answer, right? It’s a compounding, right? Like we are so far removed from our food source now, right? We’ve since the Industrial Revolution, right? Like we are so far removed from the tangible touch points of nature that we’re used to, that really contextualizes how ecosystems work and our role within it. I think that’s a. That’s a big piece of it. You know, I mean, we. We could go on into redlining and.

Billy Almon:
And zoning and, you know, all of these other things that further kind of separate us from the natural world and have kind of isolated exposure to nature, to parks primarily. Right. But I think the. The Industrial revolution was definitely a big part of that. And then the other is, you know, a lot of land policy around how we’ve chosen to have our cities constructed and built for us. But I think one of the other things, too, is also how we typically position nature as something that is apart from us, that we tap into, not something that we are constantly surrounded by and a part of. And I think that also helps in creating this distinction between us as humans and the cockroach over there. Right.

Billy Almon:
For example. And the reason why I love this question so much is because I think part of the appeal of biomimicry and within biomimicry, there’s this idea of how do we reconnect people to a sense of being a part of nature? And I think one of the big ways we do that is by realizing that every natural thing you see is an opportunity for exposure to nature. Right. So, yes, we want the field trips. We definitely, absolutely want the field trips that can help us connect to nature. But if you actually looked at a cockroach and looked at it through the lens of technologies and, you know, ask questions around, like, why do people say that cockroaches are indestructible? You know, why do they say that they will outlive us all when you start asking the questions? I think the questions that we ask around nature are opportunities for us to build that bridge back into a closer understanding and connection to it.

Cyndi Burnett:
So to build on that, I mean, you’re talking about a cockroach. But I do want to mention I watched a video of you earlier today that was on the Animal Planet where you’re interacting with a scorpion. And in this video, you’re showing how it can reach. Besides the fact that it made me want to jump out of my seat, it reached up really high, and you also showed the strength of its arm. And from what I understand in biomimicry is to look at those processes that we see very naturally unfolding in nature and then think about how we might apply those as a problem solving method. Or I want to say it’s almost like a force connection into a problem that we’re dealing with. Is that correct? Okay, so let’s say we’re. You know, let’s say Matt and I are focused on, like, how do we extend the reach of our podcast? And we look at the scorpion, and he pushes so far up that you think, how on earth did he get that high? How can we apply what we learned from watching this video of the scorpion into our challenge of reaching more people on the podcast?

Billy Almon:
Oh, that’s all these good questions. This is perfect. I wish I would have wrote these and give them to you.

Matthew Worwood:
Can I add as well? And we’re at, like, the 0.75 inch. Okay. All right. So if you remember in the video, you went from three inches, you’re crouching down the environment more and more.

Billy Almon:
Okay, that’s right. Oh, man. This is. This is great. These are the questions that I, like, just, like, fire me off like a rocket. Because the fun thing about biomimicry is how accessible it is. So, again, it’s all in the questions. And the majority of my job, whenever I’m interacting with clients or organizations, the majority of the thing that I’m doing that I love is just asking questions.

Billy Almon:
And so with biomimicry, there’s two general approaches or starting points. One is you have an organism that it’s doing something really cool, and you’re like, oh, that feels like it could be really cool if we applied this thing to this thing over here. The flip side of that, the other approach is you start with the question of the problem that you’re trying to solve, and then you try to identify an organism that has solved for the problem that you are currently trying to solve for. So with the example of the scorpion, you could say, you know, the scorpion has a really quick whip of the tail for that stinger that it has. That would be really cool if we applied something like that to. This is super random, but like a woman’s purse, if someone wants to, like, steal their purse, like, we could have a little. Little scorpion tail that would, like, strike the person trying to steal. That’s a horrible example.

Billy Almon:
But the flip side would be, we are in education. We, as educators are looking for a way to quickly insert our learnings into vast audiences with one strike. So what you do is you. You take your question, and what we do is we. We build what’s called a biological bridge from the problem to the biology. So then we ask, okay, how would nature solve this problem? How would nature, with one shot, efficiently target and identify not a weakness, but a point of opportunity to inject something? Right? And then we would say, okay, so what in nature uses a quick strike to inject something with one blow. And then we would say, okay, well, you have, you know, snakes, and then you have scorpions. And then you have, you know, what are all the striking organisms that exist? And then what we do is we go back to the problem that you all have, and then we look at the context that you have around that problem, and then based on the context of the problem and the ideal solution, we take that context and then we say, okay, what of the organisms that we’ve identified? Which one fits the context as best as possible? So you’re.

Billy Almon:
You’re constantly comparing the parallel between those two, and then based on which one fits the best context, like, which has the same kind of conditions around how it strikes and what causes it to strike, and under what conditions are most successful for. For both. And then based on that, that’s when you select, okay, it’s the scorpion who has the same kind of conditions of. It’s in a dry area that lacks resources. Right. So it has to have one quick strike because it can’t afford to strike another time. Right. And that might match the same conditions of, you know, we only have this limited budget, right.

Billy Almon:
Resources, like nutrients in nature are a resource, you know, the same with capital, you know, and funding. Right. So both of these have low nutrient or low resource availability. So the strategy of how they strike is parallel. And that. That helps us identify. Hopefully that wasn’t too, like, all over the place, but, like, that helps us identify which organism is best for us to model our answer off of.

Matthew Worwood:
I love that. And I can see why it was probably a little bit challenging by starting off with the scorpion, because ultimately it’s the question that has to come first. But where we’ve landed at the scorpion and the connections you made to limited resources, because you kind of like listening to your story, you also start envisioning that scorpion as well, and you’re thinking about. Also, it’s patient and it waits for the right opportunity to come because it only has one strike. And, you know, it also has a strike that’s really penetrating, as you said. Like, it’s got. I think it was. It was 35 miles per hour.

Matthew Worwood:
Like, really crushes. Crushes its prey as well.

Billy Almon:
Yeah.

Matthew Worwood:
And so it makes you think about, well, what type of content could that be, where the right opportunity emerges. What is the best and most effective strike that we can make with the limited resources that we have to guarantee the catch. And as you’re telling the story, Billy, what I couldn’t help but do is visualize the scorpion, which I think was informing a lot of the ways in which I was kind of formulating ideas to address the problem. And so it makes me kind of go back to this idea of, like, taking a pause and making observations of nature. But more importantly, that first question I asked about having to go outside, you had kind of said, you can sometimes bring, like, things like insects in. Like, we could go in, for example, go to a pet store, pick up some pet food for snakes, which I think are things like grass, grasshoppers, bring them into the classroom environment and actually just teach our students to make observations and from those observations, begin to ask questions as well. Is. Is that kind of right, this visual piece and how connected that is to all of this as well?

Billy Almon:
Absolutely. Absolutely. It’s all accessible. It’s so accessible. It’s so accessible. So there was. I had the. This opportunity to study ecosystems, native ecosystems in Hawaii, throughout the islands.

Billy Almon:
And there was a Hawaiian naturalist who was there, and she told this story of how the native Hawaiians traditionally would teach the younger students and those growing up, right? And so what they would do is they would point to something and then they would ask them questions to tell them, what are they observing? What do you see? What is this? Tell me about this. Tell me about what you’re seeing. They wouldn’t tell them outright. They wouldn’t explain it to them, and then make sure that they understood what they said. They started with the questions, which is why, you know, going to what I was saying earlier, why I love just being in a position to ask questions, because those peel back the layers. But it also allows you to go on your own journey of discovery. And by you going on your own journey of discovery, you reward yourself. Your brain rewards you for what you discover, which makes the discovery that much more intrinsic and valuable to you because you are the one who figured it out.

Billy Almon:
So when we bring things, and it could be a bone, it could be dried out, leaf, like, all of these things have so many different connections, that part of the fun is not only highlighting the thing, but what it’s connected to. What is the cascade of looking at this, you know, you used to live in D.C. what is the cascade of studying all of these millions of husks and molds, molds of cicadas, Right. As we look at this, what questions come up when you see, you know, an empty casting of a cicada that grew out of this? Right. And those questions lead you on new paths of discovery. So all of these are opportunities for us to take students on their own journey of discovery that will reward them and also build in the curiosity. Right. So discovery rewards curiosity.

Billy Almon:
Right? When I’m curious about something, when I ask questions about it, when I investigate it, when I find the answer, I’m getting a reward. I’m getting a little dopamine hit right for the discovery. My brain rewards me for recognizing patterns. So you’re building in the behaviors to make them curious by allowing them to answer the questions for themselves.

Cyndi Burnett:
I’ve always thought that curiosity is the conduit to creativity, so what a beautiful way to look at it through nature.

Matthew Worwood:
Do you want to bring more creative and critical thinking into your school? Look no further than our podcast sponsor, Curiosity to Create.

Cyndi Burnett:
Curiosity to Create is a nonprofit organization dedicated to engaging professional development for school districts and empowering educators through online courses and personal coaching.

Matthew Worwood:
And if you’re craving a community of creative educators who love new ideas, don’t miss out on their creative thinking network. Get access to monthly webinars, creative lesson plans, and a supportive community, all focused on fostering creativity in the classroom.

Cyndi Burnett:
To learn more, check out curiositytocrereate.org or check out the links in the show notes for this episode. So, Billy, before we go, we’d love to hear from you what your Dream and Adapt framework is.

Billy Almon:
Yeah, so the Dream and Adapt framework is really about empowering people to realize that all of those crazy big dreams that we have or the big aspirations we have for our organizations are all possible. And even though there are realities that we have to face that make us feel like we’re going, you know, 180 degrees in the wrong direction of our goals and our aspirations, there’s actually a little piece of those dreams in every moment that we have. And so this framework is really about helping people find the dream in the current reality of what they have to adapt around and how you can still realize all of those realities and goals that feel impossible in a moment.

Matthew Worwood:
Wonderful, Wonderful. Now, Billy, before we go, we’ve got a final question that we’ve started asking of all of our guests for season 10. For season 10, it’s actually the first time I think I’ve asked it. We want you to go back and think about one of your most creative learning experiences and what made that learning experience creative.

Billy Almon:
This is going to sound weird, but the first time that I went on a research trip for our biomimicry studies, one of the professors, we were out in New Orleans and she reached down and there was some otter scat right out in the. We’re out in nature and she reaches down and she picks it up, this piece of scat that’s dried out, and she breaks it in half, and she uses it to show us, like, the diet of an otter, right? This is gross. It. Well, it was gross to me at the time because I’m like, wait, I didn’t come here to learn how to pick up otter poop. Okay, what are you teaching me? Right? And that was one of the introductions to understanding how all things relate to each other that I’ve had. But I was distracted by, like, there’s this woman who’s touching poop right now. So to me, initially, I’m like, you all know I’m an African American male, okay? And, you know, I’m like, okay, there’s this white woman who is reaching down, grabbing dry otter poop in front of me right now in Louisiana. And I don’t know what to do at this moment.

Billy Almon:
But, you know, she was my biology teacher, so what she does is she breaks it, and she starts talking about the health of the otter. And, you know, what the otter’s diet was based on the things that were coming out of this very dry, you know, old, clearly old piece of otter scat. And putting my social norms around touching poop and, you know, being in weird environments aside, and actually just listening and reframing, you know, where I was in this learning moment, she actually opened up my eyes to really understanding how all of these different things of, like, what the otter is eating and the health of what is in this dry scat is an indicator of the health of this whole system. She really reframed just my understanding of it in that one moment of, like, if my mom were here, she would have yanked me out of here by my collar. Right? But having that moment, for me, it opened up my creative understanding of how to look at moments different and how to reposition myself into other points of view that contradict my social norms. So that’s a moment that I’m always just grateful that I got to experience. And then she washed her hands, which was great. There was hand sanitizer.

Billy Almon:
So, you know, I was happy with that.

Matthew Worwood:
Well, Billy, this has been great. I think about this story. I can’t help but connect it to the fact you just spoke about objects and things that we can bring into the classroom environment. So I do think there is a theme with. With how we can kind of, like, see things in you in different ways, including poop. So please think about bringing poop into the classroom.

Billy Almon:
Please. I recommend it now. Now. I recommend it now. Now that I understand there’s a way to do it and be sanitary, I highly recommend bringing poop into your classroom.

Matthew Worwood:
All right, so what I would do is, obviously, first of all, please, anyone you know who’s interested in biomimicry or might be interested in biomimicry and just any of the sciences, I think this is a great episode for them to check out and make sure before you forward it to them, that you think they’ve got a really good sense of humor and know that we were just pretty much joking at the end there a little bit. My name is Dr. Matthew Worwood.

Cyndi Burnett:
And my name is Dr. Sydney Burnett. You’ve been listening to the Fueling Creativity and Education podcast, hosted by Matthew Worwood and Cindy Burnett. Our creative producer is Catherine Fu. Our editor is Sam Atkins. And this episode was made possible thanks to our sponsor, Curiosity.