Multidisciplinary teams composed of computer scientists, arts and computer science educators, and learning scientists from the University of Pennsylvania, MIT and Indiana University are researching how to encourage about 400 youth (ages 10-18) to creatively engage with computational textiles in afterschool and school settings. Computational textiles?textile artifacts that are computationally generated or that contain embedded computers?will capture youths? pre-existing interests in new media, fashion, and design while supporting learning and creativity in computer science, arts, design, and engineering.
The PIs are designing a new programming toolkit for 3D textile design to promote creativity and to study these tools in different workshop settings in afterschool and classroom programs. While previous efforts have focused on developing environments for 2D and 3D programming for novices, their goal is to expand these efforts to include 3D textile design to appeal to disadvantaged youth not normally drawn into computing. Moreover, they are developing an open, participatory website that allows youth to display their created artifacts and share, discuss, and remix their designs. These efforts build on our prior successes developing an online community around Scratch, which now hosts over 10,000 designers. They are engaging local youth communities and professional advisors from a variety of backgrounds to identify and encourage creative design solutions as part of their efforts to build this community, the first-ever youth community of computational textile designers.
The proposal leverages several successful developments: (1) a construction kit for building computational textiles called the LilyPad Arduino that makes this domain widely accessible for the first time; (2) research on a media-rich programming environment, Scratch, that is used by a worldwide community of designers of all ages; and (3) a conceptual framework of media arts in K-12 education that describes and analyzes creative digital production.
Using Csikszentmihalyi?s system model (1988, 1997), the PIs define creativity as the dynamic interaction between an individual?s contributions to a domain and community recognition within the field. To investigate the different components of creativity as a system, this project focuses on the technical, artistic and critical practices in youth? designs and interactions and employs a variety of assessment approaches including mixed methods data analyses of recorded group interactions, interviews with youth designers and professional artists, case studies of designers and artifacts, and log file data tracking online community participation and commentaries.
Intellectual Merit: This project presents a novel opportunity to study creativity within an emergent IT field (i.e., computational textiles and their applications) and will contribute to creativity research by providing empirically validated accounts of the system nature of creativity captured in interactions between individual designers and community feedback. Furthermore, they are developing tools for how to tailor programming to support 3D textile design, investigate an online community for sharing and validating creative computational textile designs, and investigate learning approaches in workshop models for computational textiles design for novice programmers.
Broader Impact: The proposed tools and activities broaden opportunities for youth from disadvantaged communities to develop advanced IT fluency skills by designing computationally enhanced materials and artifacts and contribute in meaningful ways to the emergent field of computational textile design. The implementation and assessment is conducted in workshops at after school sites that vary strategically in their technology experience to allow for a broader dissemination of the developed tools and activities. The findings from the work is shared with youth coordinators at professional development meetings, is presented at national conferences, and is disseminated further in academic journals and through their website.
