Fantastic Bubble Science and Media Arts

I don’t mean to be plugging the LA Times again, but it is the only newspaper I get, and there was a great article today on how a number of scientists are on the production teams at Dreamworks animation studios. This is another good example of how media arts is not only interdisciplinary, but “integrative” in the seamless interweaving of disciplines, and pushes the creation of new knowledge and content. In the article it is explained that these high level aeronautics and physics scientists sign-up for this work, not just for the money, which is better than their normal research salaries, but because it is so interesting and exciting to solve these kinds of fantastical problems.

In a small, utilitarian office in Glendale, Ron Henderson methodically jotted down equations for Isaac Newton's Three Laws of Motion on a whiteboard next to his desk. The equations, the physicist explained, are the mathematical building blocks for constructing a three-dimensional, bubble-like sphere. Henderson could easily have been preparing a lesson at Caltech, where he once was a faculty member. Instead, he was at DreamWorks Animation's Tuscany-style campus, doing his part to bridge the divide between art and science. Henderson was explaining the math behind a fluid-simulation technology that would help artists working on the upcoming movie "Home" draw soap bubbles inhabited by a race of diminutive aliens called the Boov.

In this way, media arts provides a culturally based product, a fantasy film, to investigate and create very technical and complex virtual events and experiences. This is applied engineering and design, loaded with in-depth knowledge of physics, math, 3D modeling and programming. Putting students into teams to solve these kinds of problems, albeit at a greatly simplified level, may provide a bit more motivation to learn the math, by seeing it in action, testing it, and playing with parameters towards a mind-bending, and believable result.  

When I learned the basics of the Unity game designing platform, I soon realized that the sky is not even the limit to what I could produce there. Literally, one begins with a black, infinite space, and infinite variables in the various forces of mass, resistance and gravity to work with. I fairly easily designed a primitive game, with a basic table top platform, a dozen blocks, and a rolling ball that could move the blocks. The idea was to maneuver the ball around certain blocks, while pushing others into place, without falling off of the table top. This actually gave me a tangible sense of the algebraic formulation of these variables like I had never known before. Suddenly, I experienced what algebra was really about! And it was fun and exciting!

Students should at least be provided the opportunity to apply these math skills in this kind of environment while they are learning the processes in pure abstraction on paper. And perhaps someday, it would make sense that the system could recognize the value of this kind of production as evidence of actual mastery.

Media Arts as Cultural Consciousness

We tend to think of learning and art making in schools as the mastering a set of information that is already known, such as the various techniques of drawing and painting discovered throughout history. We appear to teach students only what is already known about a subject, with the idea that they can transfer that knowledge to new situations in career or college. With media arts, students are in the position of actually contributing significantly to current knowledge, because media arts is centered in the processes of creativity and learning themselves. Students can utilize media arts forms, tools and processes in order to collectively learn and communicate directly their own ideas, perspectives and understandings of a topic. They are active participants in a culture of learning that is larger than the classroom, just as media arts exists in our contemporary global society.  Thus, media arts enacts the process of learning itself, as a culturally based process. Students develop cultural content with the possibility of a reciprocal cultural response.

We can see this concept illustrated in the controversial situation described in an LA Times article about a student-produced newscast in Carlsbad, California, which aired a film examining the issue of immunization. The film has raised the ire of local anti-immunization activists, who have accused the students of collaborating with corporate pharmaceutical interests. The students were initially interested in the idea pitched by a local pro-immunization group. They began to take up the investigation, but this group tried to lead and even direct the students. The students resisted this and decided to research it for themselves to create a balanced perspective. They came to own this process and came to their own conclusion that ultimately agreed with the pro-immunization group. This has escalated into a rather dramatic and public battle on this impassioned issue.

Without getting into the details of the argument itself, nor the students’ role in a social controversy, the story itself describes perfectly the nature of media arts in the learning process. Media arts is a vehicle for expression and learning, more than it is a contained package of content. That is how it functions within our media-based, global culture. In that sense then, media arts is a form of “cultural consciousness”. Media arts education replicates that formation within the school system. Students that produce media arts products are engaged in the actual process of cultural formation.

Students engaged in this process are learning a large number of things simultaneously. Of course they are learning about media production and marketing. They are learning how to create intentional media that effectively expresses a point of view. Through research and writing, they are gaining expertise in the content of the film, “immunization”, its history and its supporting and detracting arguments. But more significantly, they are learning about this “cultural consciousness” that media forms as a “dialectic” around its understandings and intentions, and that they can play an active role in its formation. This is a form of “media literacy”, that is an inherent part of media arts education.                     Ordinarily, students play a passive role in our society. They are seen as “not ready” to fully participate in the world. Here, students are in the middle of a social controversy, and are understanding how emotionally charged and serious information and expression can be in our world. Media, or information, attention, and communication are elements of power in the formation of our culture. These students have literally “struck a nerve” with their production, and are gaining lifelong learning in the process.

New National Media Arts Standards: Structuring 21st Century Learning and Creativity

The June 4, 2014 presentation of new National Media Arts Standards is a historic development for arts education, if not for 21st century education as a whole. Most simply described as “interdisciplinary digital arts”, including video, animation, multimedia, game, web, apps, and 3D objects and spaces, this new K-12 subject area functions as an integrative “hub” discipline, or "virtual maker space" for creativity and learning, where students can create almost any production, design, event, or experience imaginable. Just think of the possibilities of a "holo-deck" (just like the Star Trek laboratory) for the support of learning and creativity! Media arts presents extraordinary promise to engage and empower students, and to support the transformation of the educational process through real world projects, productions and experiences. Students are thus placed into the center of the learning process, through complex projects that apply core content within authentic contexts. This supports both the usual acquisition of facts and formulas, as well as an “enactive” and “constructivist” pedagogy, whereby the student has an active role in constructing his or her own meaning through their productions and designs for local and global communities. 

The collective endorsement of “Media Arts” by the National Coalition for Core Arts Standards is a leap forward for the arts in education. Media arts is a 21st century discipline, reflected within our media infused, global culture, which will remain relevant to young people even as it continues to evolve. By its very nature, categorizing this rather amorphous, evolving, and intersecting discipline is an innovative leap. It exhibits the unique ability of the arts to literally "think outside of the box" and embrace change. The "traditional" arts disciplines (Dance, Music, Theatre and Visual Arts) have therefore supported media arts to develop its own intrinsic specializations for the integration with, and mutual benefit of all arts and academic subject areas. It actually posits a novel understanding of the arts and aesthetics, to which technology and media add an amplifying aspect, and which the traditional arts disciplines would have been unable to coherently co-develop. 

The Media Arts Standards are designed to reflect this inter-connective, dynamic area. While avoiding limiting specifics in evolving technology and forms, they primarily describe the production and design process across conception, development, production, refinement, presentation, and analysis. Beyond that, they present the iterative design process in innovative problem-solving, artistic capacities in experimentation and risk-taking, and the connecting processes of media arts in forming culture and collective understanding. Media arts pedagogy is aesthetics, production and cognition-centered, with a cultural level of implementation. Students are thus active cultural participants as producers and designers. This is where the metacognitive nature of media arts comes to the fore. Not only do students construct and learn from this new content, they are in the position to directly learn about the learning process itself, both at individual and cultural levels. This “student-sourced” form of learning, "dissolves the walls of the classroom" to bridge current divides between subject areas and between student and community for a multiplying "culture of learning". Stay tuned as media arts continues to grow, develop, and is adopted by states and districts across the U.S.!

Media Arts Education: 21st Century Learning and Creativity

          Media arts is a newly distinguished, nationally available, “5th arts content discipline”, that encompasses cinema, animation, imaging, sound, interactive and virtual design, including game, app, web, 3D and multimedia design. This dynamic assembly forms an intersecting, “creative hub” that can integrate any and all arts and academic content disciplines in interdisciplinary, project and design-based forms of learning. As a virtual “maker studio space” for creative expression and inventive design, students can share their points of view, research, experiment, and present information about their communities, and construct entire interactive, virtual worlds.

         Within this creative, virtual space, where students can produce or design almost anything imaginable, students are fully engaged in the learning process through authentic, 21st century practices. They work together to discover and solve problems through the creation of cultural products and experiences, actively representing and enacting their new knowledge. They realize for themselves the tangible rewards and connective power of learning. They come to govern and value the process of learning itself, towards becoming self-directed, lifelong learners. Media arts forms the potential for a connective, “culture of learning”, that "dissolves classroom walls" across the local community and the larger world.

         Consider these examples of media arts education in action:

•             Students are challenged with designing a sustainable community on Mars. They produce media arts projects to investigate, develop and present their findings and propositions to scientists and their community: multimedia portraits and interactive maps of their local community; investigatory documentary and news segments on the various aspects of environmental, Mars and Earth science; models and prototypes of new technologies necessary for settling on Mars; animations and games about the adventure and technical challenge of travelling to and thriving on a remote, inhospitable planet; and animated, virtual 3D architectural renderings of their proposed community. (NASA/JPL)

•             Students engage in online cultural exchanges with classrooms around the world, exhibiting their local communities, their ideas and dreams, academics, culture and arts, and the issues and challenges of their society and environment. Through various “transmedia” channels, students can produce and share: news, academic presentations (TED), dance, poetry and music videos, interactive games, live theater and music presentations, interviews, streaming chats and twitter feeds, etc. They can interact and reflect on each other’s educational methods, cultures and consider potential future collaborations.

•             Students produce historical video games, which incorporate a diverse range of skills and concepts, such as: visual, spatial, and interactive composition, character design, story development, environmental design, game theory, spatial and interactive computations, code, script-writing, psychology, marketing, interactive motion physics, 3D surface rendering, etc, all based around the content knowledge of a historical setting.

•            Limited English Speakers work collaboratively with fluent English speaking peers on a variety of video production projects and formats, including talk shows, cooking, reality, game, drama, and talent shows. They must actively utilize and expand their language fluency in examining, analyzing and evaluating media examples, and then in collaborative, organizational production processes, and in playing various roles in the productions.

•             Students construct a virtual environment, with limited space, time and resources, where they must learn to collaborate and negotiate in order to maintain peace and avoid conflict, all while designing sustainable cities.

       Media arts brings the arts and design fully to the center of learning as a holistic and culturally based process. Given the wide range of mediums and forms available within media arts, and its capacity for integrating all arts and academic contents, the possibilities for students’ applied creativity are endless, and the potential for student learning is limitless. "Media Arts", as a core, PK-12 arts discipline, will be available by Summer, 2014, for formal educational adoption and usage by all states and districts, through the development of voluntary standards and assessments by the NationalCoalition for Core Arts Standards (NCCAS).

Science and Media Arts: Sylvia Todd's Youtube Science

Sylvia Todd, whiz kid behind ‘Sylvia's Super-Awesome Maker Show,’...

nydailynews.com

Sylvia Todd is a bright young tinkerer on the go. She addressed TEDx conferences and showed her latest D.I.Y. creation, a robot that can paint, to President Barack Obama — and she has not yet turned 12. 

       If you check out this link, you'll see that 11 year old Sylvia Todd creates sophisticated, entertaining youtube videos about science concepts. This is an excellent example of learning through media arts, and of STEAM. We learn a lot by watching them. That's the first level of learning. But, as I have stated previously, by producing a film, the student herself comes to understand the given topic in a much deeper manner by enacting it through multimodal project development. In this case, Sylvia is synthesizing these topics using her own constructed language, contexts, analogies, metaphors, props and multimodal actions. This is deep learning. And it's fun!!

Some thoughts come to mind about these examples.

        

       Is this art? Yes, obviously this is an arts-based medium through which she is communicating. This question itself might arise because we consider this kind of video somewhat utilitarian, even if it is imaginatively produced. It's a documentation of a technical process. It's only about Science. It's very simple in its production. Who needs arts instruction to achieve this? True, it is not fancy, professional video. But it is complex. This media arts product consists of these main components:

• meaningful sequencing - structuring the presentation for meaning; timing; pacing
• visual/spatial composition - how is the frame structured in each shot?
• visual narrative - creative script-writing that works well with synched imagery
• dramatic enaction - Sylvia's winning, playful persona shines through
• audio - sounds and music enhance imagery and pump up the presentation
• animation/graphics - we get lots of extra information through well produced graphic texts
• effects - many production and editing tricks jazz up the appeal, they have commercial sophistication, and yet they retain the child-like quality of Sylvia's persona
• presentation - consideration of audience; youtube upload and distribution; channel development and promotion

       These components are probably taken for granted because of the polish of this work. She makes it look easy. Certainly, Sylvia's presentation is fantastic in conveying the topic. But we need to step back to appreciate that the aesthetic components are extremely important to its effectiveness and popularity. Sylvia has already thoroughly considered these, which make them great productions. But we need to consider their contribution to Sylvia's cognitive development as she and her work matures. Clearly, if she is thinking on all of these various levels, she's understanding not only the given topic, but is becoming a skilled and creative producer of media, a critical and discriminating viewer of media, and a proactive, empowered participant in a media-based society. When we consider the entire enterprise, science and media integrated, the learning achieves a holistic level.

         Is it rigorous? Does it really "teach" the topic for the producing student? This question arises because we assume that "real learning" only exists in texts and tests. Would we dismiss this as a frivolous activity and say, "Well, of course she should study and take tests too to make sure she 'got it'. This is just the fun part."? I would disagree to some degree. In my mind, this can be the assessment for specific standards, particularly when we're looking at the Next Generation Science Standards.  Creation is the highest process in Bloom's Taxonomy because one must have truly integrated the topic in order to produce original content with it. This goes beyond rote memorization of some fact into its performed demonstration. She is obviously confident and fluent in her knowledge. She's raised to the level of teacher here. She has demonstrated her ability to self-direct her own and others' learning. Media arts exhibits and validates that somewhat internal process.

       The implementation of media arts as a distinct arts discipline will present an open, creative space for this kind of work to occur for all students, PK-12. This represents the true integration of art and science, and the performance-based assessment of core content that media arts offers.

Media Arts as Culture-based Learning

       As seen in the example below, the integrative and cultural nature of media arts as a learning vehicle positions it as a “nexus”, or intermediary hub subject. It connects with all the other arts disciplines and subject areas. It is multimodal; potentially incorporating all senses, physical and mental capacities. It creates a contextually rich learning environment that is authentically real world. This makes the learning meaningful and engaging for students. They are really doing and making things, instead of just studying about doing them.

       This posits a dramatic re-orientation of the educational institution. It suggests that learning can now be situated within robust, cultural productions and experiences, rather than within traditional, teacher-centered presentations and test preparation. Given the premise that students learn better through contextualized, meaningful application, rather than through passive absorption and repetitive drills, then media arts would be a vital means of enhancing the contemporary learning process.

Learning Through Media Arts - Imagine Mars

       This blog will present a practical example for how media arts integration works from my own school ArtLAB in 9th grade. We want these young students to learn to be imaginative, creative and self-resourceful. We want to show them worlds of possibilities, while they learn more about their own worlds and themselves. We have partnered with our local space agency, Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL)/NASA in a STEM/STEAM, design-based project called “Imagine Mars”. The driving challenge is for students to “create a sustainable community on Mars” and finally present their findings to the scientists there in a final, rigorous review. We want to structure this over the school year.

Through some initial presentations by the collaborating teachers with introductory media from JPL, student questions are generated. This initiates the whole process of inquiry. Curiosity is the beginning of the student-centered learning process. What do they need to know in order to accomplish this seemingly impossible task? The students have many questions, of course. What’s it like on Mars? How do they get there? What exactly is meant by “sustainable”, and “community”? What kinds of resources do they have in order to accomplish this? What is JPL’s role? Soon they are imagining the answers to their problems, or at least making lists of the things they need to consider, research and test in order to reach their goal, which we can bring to a video conference with the Mars scientists at JPL. They immediately begin to own the learning process.  

       This whole project is very broad and transdisciplinary. It is not based solely in “media arts”, which is the point of “media arts integration”. We can start to blur the lines between disciplines and emphasize the higher order meaning and learning of the project as elevated by media arts processes.

       To get to the final result of a “sustainable community on Mars”, students have to know what a community is. In other words, they need to study their own community, as well as the factors of travelling to and living on Mars. How does a community sustain itself over time? What is necessary to form that kind of community? And what are the most essential components that can be retained in such an inhospitable, alien, distant environment? The question ultimately becomes, “What makes life livable”?

    Through this investigation, students will understand:

• Integrative Science - a comparison of Mars vs Earth - environment, physics, resources, etc.
• Sustainability - how do people keep their communities alive over time? How are we learning to use renewable resources and to conserve energy on Earth?
• Community - What is a community? What is absolutely necessary to create an ongoing group of people? How do we not only live, but enjoy life? What is the nature of culture itself?
• Design - How do we create things that have never existed before? How do we make sure they work? Are they really livable and durable? What are the little things in life (e.g. color, sound, diversity) that we will realize that we need and how do we include them?

     The project can involve a number of activities, including investigating and presenting findings on the Mars environment; prototyping various technologies (landers, base-camp, vehicles, clothing, physical exercises, etc) to be used on Mars; creating Mars news programs; creative and technical writing assignments; gamifying portions of the assignment, etc. The project culminates in a virtual 3D design project using Google Sketch-up.

       Over time, students actually come to understand the nature of their own world, their own community and environment and the importance of sustaining them. To learn about Mars is to understand the nature of Earth and our relationship with it. The arts and sciences are naturally intertwining and interwoven as STEAM within this kind of inquiry-based, open-ended project. This project could potentially unify even four years of high school study! Actually, perhaps it should become the standard high school curriculum!

      The media arts aspects of this particular project can be:

What is media? What media are we seeing in order to research and find things? What does this media convey and how does it convey it? What media can we make about our project to exhibit to our community and partners what we are doing and learning? How do we use media, design and art to imagine and create our worlds? What are the capacities and limitations of these various mediums and technologies? What media makes up a community? What is the function of media, design and art in a community? What is creativity and expression? How are they vital to communities and individual well being? What is the nature of the systems of media production and presentation? etc.

      The media arts forms can be:

Documentation, promotional media, informational presentations, graphic design, scientific vs. artistic photography, aesthetics, virtual design, animation, special effects, websites, website production, interactivity in virtual design, programming, modeling and prototyping, architecture, industrial design, environmental design, game design, sound - ambient, soundtracks, music for effect, music as cultural necessity, etc, etc.

       In reflecting on this integrative project, we see here that media arts has very diverse aspects and uses as an interconnective "hub" discipline. It is an underlying force for bringing all of these seemingly disconnected components and aspects into a unifying, active environment of exploration and invention. We live and learn in a multimedia and “media arts” world, where we can imagine anything, and what we imagine can become real.

      Thus, media arts serves a central, integrative role within 21st Century learning. Due to its ubiquity and social force within our culture, it is necessary for all students to understand and consider the aspects of media arts in how we understand, represent and create our current and future worlds. That is why these media arts standards are vital to our current educational transitions.