FEATURE
ART IN MOTION
Tamara Pearson and Katie Henry integrated physical computing in art lessons to engage students who might not see themselves as computer scientists
n 2018, students from Sandtown Middle School in Atlanta, Georgia toured an American Civil Rights photography exhibit at the High Museum of Art, but this wasn’t a typical museum gallery walk. The visit to the museum was the start of a semester-long project known as Art in Motion – a project-based curriculum designed to authentically integrate computer science into art classes. This program helps students who don’t normally see themselves as part of the computer science pipeline to broaden their view of themselves as potential coders. The program begins with students selecting a meaningful work of art (online, in a museum, or anywhere) and creating a new work of art in response using a robotics kit and art supplies.
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n A student engaging with American Civil Rights photography during the Art in Motion project
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Art in Motion is inspired by a project known as Moving Masterpieces developed by art teacher Jayne Sweet in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Moving Masterpieces asks students to recreate a favourite work of art using robotics. Whether asking students to recreate an existing work of art or create something new altogether, here’s a pathway you can follow to integrate robotics and computer science into your art classroom.
Check your resources
What robotics tools are already being used in your school? For Art in Motion, we used Hummingbird Robotics Kits, but micro:bits or similar would also work. The important thing here is to find out what hardware or software students are already using to create with robotics. If nothing is being used in your school, you could start with Scratch, a free, web-based application that you can use to integrate creativity and computer science into any classroom. Does one year group seem to be using more physical computing tools than another? If this is your first time integrating computer science into your art classroom, you may want to start working with a class with the most computing experience first. However, for a project like Art in Motion, no prior experience is actually necessary. Using tools already available in your school, and prior computing knowledge students bring to the project, will help to ensure success. But remember, this project is about helping students broaden their view
of themselves and computer science. If you continually rely on a small group of students who have attended an expensive summer camp or after-school robotics club to ‘help you teach’, you may be unintentionally putting up walls between yourself, the content, and the rest of the students. Disrupting negative bias and stereotype with and for historically under-represented groups such as students of colour, girls, students with special needs, resource-poor and rural students, requires intentional effort on your part to be sure that these students see themselves represented in the process. Just because some of your students may have greater computing
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TRUE CREATIVITY INVOLVES A SURPRISE ALONG THE WAY
knowledge than you doesn’t mean you can throw good pedagogy out the window and let these students run the show with bad classroom practices. You don’t want to say to your students, “Computer Science can be for anyone,” then accidentally teach it’s only for people who can afford summer camps or have care-givers who can provide transportation to after-school clubs. Find out where the resources of hardware, software, and computing skill are in your school and use them to launch
