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.
This grant focused on the emerging field of electronic textiles, or e-textiles—computers that can be soft, colorful, approachable, and beautiful. E-textiles are articles of clothing, home furnishings, or architectures that include embedded computational and electronic elements. Examples include handbags that store and playback knitting patterns, traditional embroideries that glow and sing, and dresses that register and respond to our movements like wearable companions. E-textiles aren’t all whimsical however; they are also found in smart military uniforms, sportswear that monitors health indicators, and portable medical devices. Our research in this grant collectively examined a collection of tools and materials that enable novices—including educators, hobbyists, and youth designers—to create and learn with e-textiles. In terms of intellectual merit, we designed and implemented a series of research studies that examined the learning of crafting, circuits and computation with elementary, middle, high school, and college students in classrooms and community workshops. As a result we have evidence that working with e-textiles not only helps students learn about the basics of circuitry and computational concepts but also broadens their perceptions about computing and engineering at large. We also gained insights on how to evaluate and leverage the creative dimensions of learning with e-textiles. In addition, we designed an online community for e-textile crafters called the "Lilypond" (see: lilypond.mit.edu) in which students, adults, and hobbyists shared their e-textile creations. It also provided access to additional resources to materials and DIY guides in learning with e-textiles. We also conducted preliminary development and testing of a new programming environment named "DressCode". This software allows people to write programs that generate patterns and designs for clothing and accessories. The designs are fabricated using machines like laser cutters, vinyl cutters, and automated embroidery machines. Young people then assemble fabricated pieces into finished artifacts. Preliminary user studies indicate that DressCode can help young people learn programming through media they find compelling and personally expressive. In terms of broadening impact, we collected evidence from our classroom and workshop studies that e-textiles are uniquely poised to address a growing concern in the engineering and technology fields, that of the dwindling presence of women and minorities. We found that e-textile community is composed largely of women, in stark contrast to more traditional electronic and programming hobbyist communities, which are overwhelmingly male (Buechley & Hill 2010). While e-textiles’ better-known relative, robotics constructions, have been widely deployed in schools for the purpose of broadening young people’s exposure to technology and engineering (and have become a mainstay of school and college activities, even culminating in local and national competitions), they are mostly targeted to boys and can exacerbate the fields’ gender gaps. We found that recruitment into classes and workshop was successful in bringing in large number of girls and women (in many instances more than half of participants) but also appealed to boys. Finally, we put together a comprehensive book edition "Textile Messages: Dispatches from the World of Education and Electronic Textiles" (Buechley, Peppler, Eisenberg & Kafai, 2013, Peter Lang Publishers) for the technology education and computer science education community presenting overview on different electronic textile construction kits and examples of the ways in which educators, researchers, and young people are employing them to build new technology, new curricula, and new creative communities.
