RoBallet: exploring learning through expression in the arts through constructing in a technologically immersive environment
David CavalloArnan SipitakiatAnindita BasuShaundra BryantLarissa Welti-SantosJohn MaloneySiyu ChenErik AsmussenCynthia SolomonEdith Ackermann
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Abstract:
We present the RoBallet environment as an interesting area for learning in a variety of domains through augmenting performing arts with technology. In the RoBallet environment children choreograph dance movements while wearing sensors and wireless microcontroller boards as well as having more sensors and devices in the environment. The children build robots, and program them, animations, light, and music they compose to respond to their movements. We have a few primary goals in this endeavor; to open new areas for exploration, to use technology to augment expression, and to open creative and expressive uses of technology, mathematics and science to children who may otherwise have no interest. We describe a workshop we ran in conjunction with the National Dance Institute, discuss what we learned, and present our ideas for future development.Keywords:
Expression (computer science)
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The Gears of My Childhood
Before I was two years old I had developed an intense involvement with automobiles. The names of car parts made up a very substantial portion of my vocabulary: I was particularly proud of knowing about the parts of the transmission system, the gearbox, and most especially the differential. It was, of course, many years later before I understood how gears work; but once I did, playing with gears became a favorite pastime. I loved rotating circular objects against one another in gearlike motions and, naturally, my first erector project was a crude gear system.
I became adept at turning wheels in my head and at making chains of cause and effect: one turns this way so that must turn that way so . . . I found particular pleasure in such systems as the differential gear, which does not follow a simple linear chain of causality since the motion in the transmission shaft can be distributed in many different ways to the two wheels depending on what resistance they encounter. I remember quite vividly my excitement at discovering that a system could be lawful and completely comprehensible without rigidly deterministic.
I believe that working with differentials did more for my mathematical development than anything I was taught in elementary school. Gears, serving as models, carried many otherwise abstract ideas into my head. I clearly remember two examples from school math. I saw multiplication tables as gears, and my first brush with equations in two variables (e.g., 3x + 4y = 10) immediately evoked the differential. By the time I had made a mental gear model of the relation between x and y, figuring how many teeth each gear needed, the equation had become a comfortable friend.
Many years later when I read Piaget this incident served me as a model for his notion of assimilation, except I was immediately struck by the fact that his discussion does not do full justice to his own idea. He talks almost entirely about aspects of assimilation. But there is also an affective component. Assimilating equations to gears certainly is a powerful way to bring old knowledge to bear on a new object. But it does more as well. I am sure that such assimilations helped to endow mathematics, for me, with a positive affective tone that can be traced back to my infantile experiences with cars. I believe Piaget really agrees. As I came to know him personally I understood that his neglect of the affective comes more from a modest sense that little is known about it than from an arrogant sense of its irrelevance. But let me return to my childhood.
One day I was surprised to discover that some adults---even most adults---did not understand or even care about the magic of the gears. I no longer think much about gears, but I have never turned away from the questions that started with that discovery: How could what was so simple for me be incomprehensible to other people? My proud father suggested being clever as an explanation. But I was painfully aware that some people who could not understand the differential could easily do things I found much more difficult. Slowly I began to formulate what I still consider the fundamental fact about learning: Anything is easy if you can assimilate it to your collection of models. If you can't, anything can be painfully difficult. Here too I was developing a way of thinking that would be resonant with Piaget's. The understanding of must be genetic. It must refer to the genesis of knowledge. What an individual can learn, and how he learns it, depends on what models he has available. This raises, recursively, the question of how he learned these models. Thus the laws of learning must be about how intellectual structures grow out of one another and about how, in the process, they acquire both logical and emotional form.
This book is an exercise in an applied genetic epistemology expanded beyond Piaget's emphasis to include a concern with the affective. It develops a new perspective for education research focused on creating the conditions under which intellectual models will take root. For the last two decades this is what I have been trying to do. And in doing so I find myself frequently reminded of several aspects of my encounter with the differential gear. First, I remember that no one told me to learn about differential gears. Second, I remember that there was feeling, love, as well as understanding in my relationship with gears. Third, I remember that my first encounter with them was in my second year. If any scientific educational psychologist had tried to measure the effects of this encounter, he would probably have failed. It had profound consequences but, I conjecture, only very many years later. A pre- and post- test at age two would have missed them.
Piaget's work gave me a new framework for looking at the gears of my childhood. The gear can be used to illustrate many powerful advanced mathematical ideas, such as groups or relative motion. But it does more than this. As well as connecting with the formal knowledge of mathematics, it also connects with the body knowledge, the sensorimotor schemata of a child. You can be the gear, you can understand how it turns by projecting yourself into its place and turning with it. It is this double relationship---both abstract and sensory---that gives the gear the power to carry powerful mathematics into the mind. In a terminology I shall develop in later chapters, the gear acts here as a transitional object.
A modern-day Montessori might propose, if convinced by my story, to create a gear set for children. Thus every child might have the experience I had. But to hope for this would be to miss the essence of the story. I fell in love with the gears. This is something that cannot be reduced to purely cognitive terms. Something very personal happened, and one cannot assume that it would be repeated for other children in exactly the same form.
My thesis could be summarized as: What the gears cannot do the computer might. The computer is the Proteus of machines. Its essence is its universality, its power to simulate. Because it can take on a thousand forms and can serve a thousand functions, it can appeal to a thousand tastes. This book is the result of my own attempts over the past decade to turn computers into instruments flexible enough so that many children can each create for themselves something like what the gears were for me.
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The links between music and computation date back at least three decades. This trend has led to the development of learning environments for novices to make music and learn computational concepts. However, research connecting music and computation is mostly situated within the context of on-screen programming, with little research involving hybrid, tangible environments. Electronic textiles (e-textiles) is one such hybrid context where learners craft interactive physical artifacts by sewing microcontrollers, sensors, and actuators onto toys, clothes, or other fabric accessories. Prior studies show that Arduino-based e-textiles afford opportunities for students to learn basic concepts such as variables and control flow but not more advanced concepts such as arrays and for loops. In our study, we expand learning with e-textiles as learners compose and code music to address the following research question: What are the affordances of designing musical wearables to deepen computational conceptual learning? We present a case study of a group of four 15-17-year-old youth and an adult co-making a musical wearable-JazzHands-a glove augmented with actuators such as LEDs and speaker, and motion, touch, and light sensors. We analyzed videos of the group's collaborative design sessions, student daily journals, multiple versions of the code, and post-workshop, artifact-based interviews with the youth. Our analysis revealed that making musical wearables not only allowed the youth to express themselves and relate to computing as a creative endeavor but also afforded unique opportunities to work with constructs such as arrays indices, sensor data integration, and logical expressions to control for loops.
Affordance
Arduino
Craft
Physical computing
Wearable Technology
Artifact (error)
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This workshop examines the interplay between people, musical instruments, performance and technology. Now, more than ever technology is enabling us to augment the body, develop new ways to play and perform, and augment existing instruments that can span the physical and digital realms. By bringing together performers, artists, designers and researchers we aim to develop new understandings how we might design new performance technologies. Participants will be actively encouraged to participant, engaging with other workshop attendees to explore concepts such as; immersion, augmentation, emotion, physicality, data, improvisation, provenance, curation, context and temporality, and the ways that these might be employed and unpacked in respect to both performing and understanding interaction with new performance-based technologies that relate to the core themes of immersion and emotion.
Temporality
Improvisation
Immersion
Interaction Design
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This is an interdisciplinary research and a work in progress where we are trying to understand, investigate, document and criticize how children's learning of expressive arts, engagement and self- confidence can be augmented or transformed by the use of an on-line Forum Theater environment. The potential of this computer-based educational tool is to provide an open constructionist learning environment, or microworld, (Papert, 1990) in which the learner can safely explore and express his imagination, creativity, language, aesthetics, participatory design, written skills, conflict resolution, role- playing, decision-making, and coordinated teamwork. We will study the distinctions between learning in a regular drama environment, a computer-based forum theater environment, and an ideal environment that blends both drama and forum theater techniques, as well as my proposed Virtual Forum Theater learning environment.
Learning environment
Participatory Design
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This talk will present the results of a collaborative learning experience between students from the visual arts and computing sciences exploring the intersection between art, music, and interactive technology. Our goal is to provide an experiential learning environment that models industry in an experimental setting; fostering innovation and advancing the students skills while exposing them to technologies from other disciplines. It is our goal that the experience will assist them in developing critical problem solving approaches to project management.
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One of the biggest challenges that we have encountered, when trying to encourage digital games in schools, is trying to explain what its benefits are in teaching and learning environments. In this pilot experimental study we explore how multimodal audio and visual games can be used in learning environments for children, specifically by fostering creative behaviors through User-Centered design approaches.
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This workshop explores socially expressive technology design using collaborative principles of theater, dance and music. Building on shared roots of making something together, technologies (including virtual agents, physical devices, storytelling multimedia) and artistic provocation can create playful, productive and healthy experiences for communities. How do we: Improve collaboration between performance art and creative technology? Design apps and artistic collaboration/learning for mental health? Use theater performativity and technology to enhance our lives? As smart devices become ubiquitous, yet solidarity and cooperation remain elusive in competitive/hierarchical societies, understanding how performance art and technology collaborate can improve how we work, play and care for our and each other's health. This workshop is a forum and creative space to discuss and play with the future of performative expression and collaborative computing. We welcome researchers and practitioners from varied disciplines including technical implementation, design, theater, dance, improv, physiology and psychology. The program features collaborative creation modules across the expressive human spectrum (movement, sound, text) using digital dramaturgy (Budde, 2017) and pleasure of learning (Brecht, 2001). It also includes participants' presentations, expert talks and videos exploring the expressive side of computing technology. Accepted applicants are invited to share perspectives and collaborate on creative exercises on art/artefacts/artificiality.
Performative utterance
Performativity
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A major responsibility of educational systems in the 21st century is to prepare future generations for the challenges involved with the increasing computerization of our everyday lives and to meet the demands of one of the fastest-growing job markets: computing. The goal of our beloved AlgoRythmics project is to promote computing education for all by taking into account the key elements from the most relevant computational thinking definitions. For this purpose, we have created an engaging algorithm visualization environment that is built around a collection of interactive dynamic visualizations illustrating basic computer algorithms.
Making computing education attractive for different categories of learners is a challenging initiative. A possible approach might be contextualization. The AlgoRythmics learning environment has been designed along this approach. Since music and dance are relatively close to most people, this environment visualizes searching and sorting algorithms by professional dance choreographies (folkdance, flamenco, ballet). The “dance floor” we have created is an interactive and intuitive user interface which guides learners from dance to code. From the perspective of the teaching-learning process, the most important features of the environment are its unified, artistically enhanced, human-movement-effect-enriched, multisensory, and interactive character.
What is this book about? It is about the AlgoRythmics universe. Of course, we have not dreamt up a complex teaching-learning tool and the attached didactical methods overnight. The AlgoRythmics project has its own particular history. Through this book, we invite the reader to accompany us as we virtually relive the AlgoRythmics adventure.
Contextualization
Dance education
Interface (matter)
Physical computing
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Are fine arts and technology compatible partners" Do these disciplines support each other or flinch when they are combined like oil and water" Do collaborative efforts provide interesting insights and opportunities for students" For practitioners" There seems to be an explosion of interest in exploring arts and technology connections: new media, digital media, kinetic art, new frontiers, emergent media, interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary, and transdisciplinary are only some of the terms used to describe this fusion of disciplines.
Media arts
Digital art
Design Thinking
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Computer music research realizes a vision of performance by means of computational expression, linking body and space to sound and imagery through eclectic forms of sensing and interaction. This vision could dramatically influence computer science education, simultaneously modernizing the field and drawing in diverse new participants. In this article, we describe our work creating an interactive computer music toolkit for youth called BlockyTalky. This toolkit enables users to create networks of sensing devices and synthesizers, and to program the musical and interactive behaviors of these devices. We also describe our work with two middle-school teachers to codesign and deploy a curriculum for 11- to 13-year-old students. We draw on work with these students to evidence how computer music can support learning about computer science concepts and change students' perceptions of computing. We conclude by outlining some remaining questions around how computer music and computer science may best be linked to provide transformative educational experiences.
Computer music
Transformative Learning
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