Personally, I liked my biology classes in high school, but I didn't love them. What I loved was the teacher. She always had fun activities, and I really collected with that as a way to help me connect the topics to the real world, even if I did not always understand those connections at first. How do we make students scientists? In a lot of classes, we are being taught scientific knowledge or we are taught science skills, but without a personal connection to the content, we do not consider ourselves scientists. Ways to foster this connection that students have to science could be through inquiry based learning or through a sense of playing as learning (recess).
Some forms of recess in a biology classroom might include physical activity, open ended discussions, lab explorations, games, or arts-and-crafts activities. These activities can all be educational, but they are so fun that the students do not realize that they are learning. They also offer the opportunity to connect biology to other content areas or student interests.
As a student, I have had teachers see when students have too much pent-up energy, and they will make the students do meditation breathing, jumping jacks, or some other exercises. When I was helping to grade the work of my underclassmen, they had an assignment where they had to randomly pick an environment and some physical features, and then they would design the creature that lived in the environment and explain the physical structures and their function within the environment. These fun activities allowed students to create and explore. That is why I love biology so much and want to pass that on to my own students.