Artistic Computing | Dr. Kayla DesPortes

Computational Murals

Sun, 12 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Overview

The project explores the co-design of artistic computing curriculum with visual and literary artists. The effort is a collaboration with the non-profit organization Community Word Project, which is an “arts-in-education organization that inspires children in underserved communities to read, interpret and respond to their world and to become active citizens through collaborative arts residencies and teacher training programs”. The organization aims at supporting their learners to use poetry, visual art, and music as platforms to amplify their voices. The researchers have been working with the organization and their artists for the past year to explore the potential of integrating computational media as an additional platform for expression. The work has resulted in two participatory design sessions with students and artists, which has led to the launch of CWP 2.0–a 12-week program for high school students to create physical and digital computational murals using processing ( p5js ) and the Arduino. The students engage in developing a collaborative line of poetry and currating a portfolio of photography, as they learn about both the physical and digital forms of computing to create their murals.

Research Questions Explored

The project explores research questions spanning the design of learning activities and computational platforms to support learners and educators in these interdisciplinary spaces.

How can we design learning environments that enable learners to use computational media as a platform for expression?
- How can the design of physical computing platforms and programming environments support the processes of ideation, iteration, and development of murals?
- What are the affordances for expression the digital and physical forms of expression?
- What pedogogical supports are important for supporting the design and development of physical and digital murals?
- What values emerge in the learning environment as learners engage in development of their collaborative computational murals?
How do we support collaboration between learners to make decisions across their poetry, photography, coding and electronics in ways that align with their goals for expressivity?
- How can the design of activities, pedagogical supports, and technology promote engaging across the disciplines?
- How can we support collaboration in the ideation, iteration, and development phases of the students’ artistic artifacts?

Research Team

The research has been conducted in partnership with the Community Word Project organization and the researchers at NYU.

CWP Leads:
- David King - Program Director of School & Community Partnerships
- Elizabeth Leonard - Poet and Teaching Artist
- Michele Kotler - Executive Director and Founder
- Nichelle Ryan - Photographer and Teaching Artist
- Leigh Wells - Deputy Director of Programs & Operations
NYU Leads:
- Juan Pablo Sarmiento - PhD Student in Educational Communication and Technology
- Eunice Lam - MS Student in Digital Media Design for Learning
- Dr. Kayla DesPortes - Assistant Professor of HCI and the Learning Sciences
- Previous Collaborators:
  - Zahra Humaira - MS in Digital Media Design for Learning
  - Mengqiu Chen - MS in Digital Media Design for Learning
  - Jack Lu - MS in Digital Media Design for Learning
  - Eunyoung Jeon - MS in Digital Media Design for Learning

Dancing Across Boundaries of Computing Education

Sun, 12 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Overview

The project examines how to integrate machine learning, data science, and physical computing in the context of dance and cheerleading. The work is part of a collaborative grant between NYU and University of Colorado Boulder, which uses both locations to explore across a number of dance and cheerleading environments. The goal is to understand how to help learners leverage their expertise and cultural practices in order to engage them in authentic and personally meaningful computing. The dancers and cheerleaders will learn to create computing systems with programmable electronics worn on the body (physical computing), use those systems to create statistical models of movement and gesture (data science and machine learning), and then apply the models in a digital experiential learning environment. We are working closely with dance educators and learners to produce design principles, curricula, new educational technologies, and comparative analyses across contexts. In NYC, we have a partnership with the non-profit organization STEM From Dance and its founder and CEO Yamilee Toussaint Beach. The organization “gives girls of color access to a STEM education by using dance to empower, educate, and encourage them as our next generation of engineers, scientists, and techies.” Through working with Yamilee, their instructors, and learners we are building on the powerful programming they have already developed to expand the types of concepts the learners can encounter within a computational dance environment.

Research Questions Explored

This project addresses four main research questions:

How can computing be leveraged to build expertise in dance and cheerleading?
How can dance and cheerleading be leveraged to build expertise in computing?
What are the challenges of integrating computing into dance and cheerleading practices?
How can we meaningfully assess learning outcomes and dispositional shifts with respect to computing in the context of dance and cheerleading applications?

This research will produce curriculum and technology to support learning modules in machine learning, data science, and, physical computing, integrating multiple levels of abstraction across the boundaries of hardware and software (i.e., cyber-physical systems). Through this collaborative inquiry researchers will develop transformative knowledge about how to embed computing into established dance practices, resulting in computing curricula and tools that build on the learners’ and educators’ authentic practices and needs.

Research Team

Yamilee Toussaint Beach - CEO & Founder of STEM From Dance
Willie Payne - PhD Student in Music Technology @ NYU
Dr. Kayla DesPortes (PI) - Assistant Professor of HCI and the Learning Sciences @ NYU
Dr. Yoav Bergner (Co-PI) - Assistant Professor of Learning Sciences and Educational Technology @ NYU
Dr. Ben Shapiro (Co-PI) - Assistant Professor of Computer Science @ CUB

Funders

This project has been funded by the National Science Foundation (STEM+C 1933961).

Data+Art Literacy Curriculum Co-Design

Sun, 12 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Overview

This project explores an art-based perspective on data literacy to promote student relevance, accessibility, engagement, reasoning, and meaning-making with data. Data literacy, or interpreting and reasoning about data, is an essential skill set to be able to inform decisions and actions in today’s society. Collaborating with In collaboration nwith with middle school art and math teachers, we are co-designing curriculum that leverages diverse representational forms, ways of knowing and understanding data.

Research Questions Explored

The work examines:

How do we support effective co-design of data literacy units among art teachers, mathematics teachers, and researchers?
How can we develop educational materials and technology to leverage the representational opportunities across artistic and mathematical practices?
How can we build synergistic curricula for art and math to conceptually support one another?

Answers to these questions will build an understanding of how to support interdisciplinary curriculum design collaborations among researchers and teachers. They will also show how art-integrated, maker-oriented activities can support middle school learners’ data literacy development; and how to design technologies that are accessible and powerful to teachers and learners in these interdisciplinary environments.

Research Team

The work is a collaborative project across New York University, Education Development Center, and Fordham University.

Anna Amato - PhD Student Educational Communication & Technology @ NYU
Marian Tes - PhD Student Educational Communication & Technology @ NYU
Camillia Matuk - Assistant Professor @ NYU (PI)
Kayla DesPortes (Co-PI) - Assistant Professor of HCI and the Learning Sciences @ NYU
Ralph Vacca - Assistant Professor @ Fordham (Co-PI)
Megan Silander - Research Scientist @ EDC (Co-PI)
Veena Vasudevan - Post-Doc @ NYU
Peter Woods Consultant PhD Candidate @ University of Wisconsin-Madison

Funders

This project has been funded by the National Science Foundation (DRK12 1908557).

The MoveLab

Sun, 12 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Overview

The MoveLab was an interdisciplinary informal educational project combining dance and technology as a medium for expression for the learners. The workshop spanned several communities involving artists and organizers from a local non-profit arts collective, students from Georgia Tech, and students and mentors from a community organization focused on providing personal growth opportunities for underserved girls in metro-Atlanta. This was our first investigation understanding the design of a learning environment focused on creating a community of learners that promoted self-reflection and integration of student values.

Motivation

The MoveLab was intended to create a community of learners by bringing in learners from different backgrounds to work together building, designing and teaching one another as they learned about dance and technology. We wanted to understand if we could create a computing and dance educational environment that provided insights on how to develop inclusive learning environments. Integrating meta-design processes, which are a type of participatory design, scaffolded the learners to self-reflect on issues that were important to themselves and integrate these reflections into their design processes for the dance. The participants created three dances that centered on the expression of themes involving self-esteem, deforestation of nature, and bullying.

Each of the groups integrated technology in different ways. Below is a picture of a dance top constructed by the group focused on bullying. The students mimed out a bully pushing another student using the (a) capacitive touch sensors which then triggered a buzzer (b) to go off and the LEDs (c) to turn red. Throughout the dance the student stands up to the bully and then becomes friends with the bully at which point the students had the LED change to blue, triggered by another touch to the capacitive sensors.

Research

The research questions that we were trying to understand within the MoveLab were:

RQ1 How can we create an inclusive community of learners using dance and technology as a medium for expression?

RQ2 What characteristics of a learning environment help students develop alignment between their self-concept and the disciplines of computing and dance?

Throughout the workshop we found dynamic processes that were occurring during each encounter with the technology. These nonlinear processes were shaping the students’ self-conceptions of how they aligned and rejected views of themselves in relation to computing and technology. We found that students would create alignment with computing through experiences which allowed them to take agency, be proud of their work, narrow their expertise, develop a group identity, and express their personal values. On the flip side students would reject views of themselves in relation to computing when they rejected preconceived ideas of computing, they were trying to avoid failure, when they had conflicting values with the work, and when they rejected participation with the group. Each student had a different path throughout the workshop as they experienced a variety of different situations; thus arriving at different perspectives of computing by the end of the workshop.

Computing and dance were integrated into the learning environment as a medium for expression and communication. We found that this provided opportunities for the dances and technology within these dances to serve as boundary objects enabling students to project multiple values onto their interpretations. The meta-design processes embedded in the learning activities prompted students to express the things they cared about in their dialogue, interactions with one another, and design of computing artifacts.

Publications

DesPortes, K., Spells, M., & DiSalvo, B. (2016a). Interdisciplinary Computing and the Emergence of Boundary Objects: A Case-Study of Dance and Technology. International Society of the Learning Sciences, (pp. 890-893). [Download]

DesPortes, K., Spells, M., & DiSalvo, B. (2016b). The MoveLab: Developing Congruence Between Students’ Self-Concepts and Computing. (pp. 267–272). ACM [Download]

Research Team

Monet Spells - MS in Human-Computer Interaction @ Georgia Tech
Dr. Kayla DesPortes - Assistant Professor of HCI and the Learning Sciences @ NYU
Dr. Betsy DiSalvo - Associate Professor @ Georgia Tech

Note: this was done as part of my PhD work @ Georgia Tech under the advisement of Betsy.