Final Assignment - Final Project

My three dices are:
creative coding & body & drawing

Here is the final outcome - a scratch biology game!




So my initial idea was to make a puzzle game that can show different parts of human body. When I discussed my idea with Sarah, she said I can add more educational purpose in the game. So I decided to make a biology game to define different part of human skeleton. I chose skeleton is because I barely know the English name of all of them so I though this might be a good idea for me, or any other second-language learner to know more about skeleton terms.

Process:
1) Prepare the bones!
First of all, I found a nice high resolution skeleton body image without any label. Credits to 123RF.

And then found a cute skeleton body with label on it.

After read through the label, I cut each part off in photoshop.

And save them separately.

2) First Part of Game: Disorganize the skeleton!

Every time we play the puzzle game, the puzzles are always disorganized. So in Scratch, the first we need to do is - disorganize the puzzles!

First we need to select all the twelve parts of skeleton as character in Scratch. When I clicked on the flag, the avator would automatically copy themselves and change the costume to next. Code example is as following screenshot.

However, there is not any disorganizing button or function, which means we need to created one. I created place function that would place each part to the pre-setting location.

3) Second Part of the Game: Put it Together!

Now here comes the most difficult part. How to put the skeleton together?

First of all, this game is for beginners, which means it should have instruction to guide players to play. Therefore, I set up the background as the human skeleton itself in order to show clearly the place for which part.

Then, how to reinforce memory through puzzling remains an open issue. I thought about if for a couple of days. And then I came up an idea: what if I place each part a different item? When that part of skeleton touches that item, the "if-do"loop would work and generate sound and wordy signs to show the name of that part.

Therefore, I attached twelve yellow balls on each part and set the code with loop.

I am not sure the reason of this sounding function not working is because my Internet connect is poor (I am connecting my personal hotpot because Spectrum Internet is for some reason not working) or my code has bug.

Now I am working on the debugging and will test it on with better Internet. Hopefully I can fix this function before the class

12/12 15:00 Update!

I fixed the bug! Or it is not a "bug" - the sound and word effect did not come up as I thought it should be only because I set then control function as click it. When the bones are on the correct place, you click it and now it can say the term of who it is with sound.

And that's the finally project. What I learned is not the deep practice of different, complicated scratch function, but how to test out my plan and how to do trouble shooting, as what I learned from the previous works. Those are meaningful process that can and have already given me more confidence, patience and most important, experience to handle bigger, more complicated problem in the future.

Blog Entry to My Digital Stewardship Slides

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1JTrXGRfZGIp8C6ziFM_6KUz4K5G-cbBdBKvYskg0YsM/edit?usp=sharing

Feel free to view and comment through Link.

Love y'all!💗

Final Week Assignment- Take a Selfie

5/3 Take a Selfie

As what I set at the beginning of the class, my learning objective was, and is continuing "learning as much as new forms of media and technologies that have already or will be used in those media". Now, at the very end of the semester, I can say I learned a lot from this class and yet those are only the beginning in my life-long journey of learning.

For each week's assignment, (in order to complete the homework) we have great opportunity to practice new media and new tools or technologies that would be used in the media project. Even though sometimes I felt there is too much too learn and what I learned in class was not enough for me to complete the homework - I had to go for Lynda.com or look for youtube tutorials to understand how to use the tool or the technology - I still feel blessed that I have a piece of valuable time to learn new forms of media and see what I can achieve with those forms of media and those new tools. It is also a great chance to learn how to learn by myself when I look back. I practiced video making and Scratch, learned how to use AI and Audacity, and tried my best to learn laser-cutting and circuits. There are lots of moments of "Oh my god I cannot do it" but thankfully I, or our team made it, and I believe those "wow" moments somehow enlighten the curiosity, in my mind, to know more and practice more - not only about know more interesting novel tools and technologies, but also dig deeper to investigate the media that I just learned to see what else I can make through it. It is like an adventure and it just began.

Week Twelve Assignment 2/2

This is the final look:

Our Idea:
After teaming up with Yuke, We thought what kind of outcome we want to have from this circuit and different colors of light...so what about traffic light?

We chose traffic light not because it is a combination of three colors of light, but it is also meaningful in education to teach kids how to cross the road under the guide of traffic light, not only as a passenger, but also as a future driver.

Process:
1) Prepare the materials
What we need are scissors, paper, color markers, paper circuit and led light.

After we setting up what we would make is a traffic light, we decided to make the background more like "road".

First, we print the zebra cross on the piece of paper.

 And then, we prepared the young pedestrians who are waiting to cross the road. Print it on a piece of paper and cut them off.

 And then, we draw a traffic light, cut it off, and draw some color on it.

2) Think how we complete the circuit 

Because traffic light is three colors that light up in sequence. They would never light up all at once or all shut up at once, which means in the circuits, we need to choose parallel circuits and then add a switch to each parallel of the light.

3) Attach the paper circuit!

This is an important part because there are lots of factor involved and any of those factor can make the circuit disconnect.

We found out that we should try the conductivity of the circuit after each attachment, otherwise we can effectively find out if that parallel circuit work or if that part of circuit connect well or not.

 Then carefully mark the place of switch on traffic light and paste the switch.

4) Enjoy your final outcome!

What I learned in this project is trouble shooting because we tried so many times at the Attach the circuit part. At first we forgot to try from every step and started to remember we should do the test out until we almost finish the circuit. We tested the green light and disappointingly found out the green light did not work. Therefore, we went to the very beginning to try if the circuit we paste was not working, and luckily, we found it was the turn of the circuit that did not paste tightly which lead to non-conducting. And after that, we tested out the conductivity of the circuit after every step and finally the traffic light worked well! This project means a lot to us because we are not science person and this is the first time we deal with physics after grade 6. If we can learn a lot from this circuit project, we definitely sure that students can learn a lot more from this hands-on circuit project.

Week Twelve Assignment 2/1

2/1

1. 20 things computer can make in class:
I was shocked that in 1972 there was an article focusing on can program capacity in education and the 20 computer tasks in 1972 are surprisingly still the cutting edge digital tasks in class. Of course, with more and more scientists and researchers put their attention on digital learning tools, what computer can offer to education are not only the 20 tasks mentioned in the paper, but also tons of platforms and countless capacities which all give students enough space to practice what they learn with real-life project and their priceless creativities. And in the future, according to Moore's law (that the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit doubles about every two years), more and more capable devices can came out and be applied in education with more powerful features and cheaper cost.
2. Why do we need digital fabrication:
In the article Digital Fabrication and ‘Making’ in Education: The Democratization of Invention, there is an interesting question - why do we need digital fabrication lab in school? Instead of the answer given in the following paragraph, I think digital fabrication has potential to fulfill student's creativity. As we grew up, creativity has become more and more rare and valuable because we have already been "programmed" by the current education and social rules that always taught us to think about what can be done in reality instead of something has not done yet. Electronics, or even making can help students realize what they imagine can come true in reality with the help of technology. The "making" is a positive activity that can enhance students' confidence and extend their hand-making ability couple with their creativity. As more and more students become more creative and "hands-on", it is great possible that our world in the future could be a much better place.

Week Eleven Assignment

2/1

      This is what came out of my mind when I played with models in Tinkercat. I found there was a category of skeleton so I tried to put the different pieces together. The process took longer than my expectation and I did enjoy what I got from there. This human skeleton has 14 pieces and they have already had their name to show where they are supposed to be in the human scale. However, putting them together is not an easy deal - aligning them in the same height and adjusting different parts to different angle demand time and patience. And of course, I need to have a plan of how the skeleton pose before I started to attach pieces together, otherwise I have to adjust all the parts to fit in the gesture. Anyway the process is fun, even though a little bit exhausting, and the final outcome looks good.

2/2 ideas of 3 dice!

I need to say a BIG "thank you" to Richard and Jackie!!! The three dices I have is

Creative coding

 Body

Drawing

So my initial idea is using scratch (easy to show the code visually) to show the human body parts. How to show the "drawing body" process?

What I can imagine is puzzles. I can make a puzzle game to make user control the cat to flip over puzzles to complete the human body (for example) in order to show the drawing body process. The technical function requiring in this project is click function, hover function and image src changing function - which I learned before. So I think the puzzle idea is doable.

Learning goals:

1.learn different body parts

2.Learn the name of body parts

Week Ten Assignment 2/2

Comments:

Danielle (3D paper doll)
Darien (Video project)
Grace (stop motion animation)
Ren (Scanography)
Yiting (Laser cutting)
Sarah (video project)
Quinta (laser cutting)

Week Ten Assignments1/2

Design Process:

I teamed up with Annie and we decided to make wood 3D puzzles in animal figure (as shown in the following pictures as example)

We planned that Annie and I would each make two animals. Annie chose seal and lion and I chose raccoon and cat.

Firstly, we started from 2D design. I found a cute raccoon image and a cat image on canva.com and purchased them to do the template.

As a 3D design, I want them to stand up with a supporter that has a hole to attach to the body part. Therefore I copy the back feet part of the body and add a slot on it.

Then I was stuck by a question that how should I make a slot on the feet part to make the body "stand up" - how wide the slot is and where should it be?

Then I met up with Annie on Tuesday after in Things space and tried to figure out the width of the slot. After several try out, we finally got the width of 3.225mm, a number that can help the supporter hold the body (but not that tightly, we still need glue to hold them together).

As a real beginner to Ai and laser cut, I had no idea to what should I do to prepare the design. Annie told me I first need to prepare the engraving, which is making animals into greyscale. I found a quick website that can complete greyscale in 1s. (https://pinetools.com/grayscale-image)

Then in order to make sure the animal can be cut out, I need to draw the black outline of the cartoon character with 0.01 stroke. I tried so many brushes and pens to make the outline tidy and clean and finally I figured out how to use pen in Ai. The process is exhausting TOT

Annie successfully cut out her seal with ball, but unfortunately we do not have enough time for cutting all the animal. We would continue the work at Wednesday evening and bring what we have to the class. 

Update 11/14:

We made it this afternoon!!!

One thing we messed up a little bit is we made the slot too tiny to hold the body. Instead of repeating doing the body part, we tried to use sand paper to rub the slot to be a bit bigger. After a couple of minutes rubbing, sand paper worked and the slots were big enough to hold the body part.

The process is fun, even though it also took us sanity. There is always something unexpected happen, like the wood width is different from piece to piece that we need to calculate all the time, and the old version Ai in the lab sometimes did not work as the way new version did (not complaining). Anyway, the important thing is we learned a lot from this laser-cutting experience - about how to manipulate Ai and the machine and how to learn something I am not familiar with. 

Week Assignment Nine

1/2: I created a little interactive game that can collect scores when the cat touches the moving clouds.
Learning Goals for users: Counting and coordinate ability between eyes and hands that control the cat;
Learning Goals for producer: Getting familiar with motion blocks and variable blocks, and try to collect the score with the block as much as possible;

2/2:
My scratch experience: Actually I started to fiddle with Scratch after I learned how to  code in words. So understanding the function and possible function of each block is not difficult for me while what is important in this game is to create projects creatively with limited blocks and how to teach young learners to understand and practice with their own creativity. The key is see and giving them chances and rooms to tinker with themselves, from my experience. In this semester I started to teach Scratch lessons for elementary level kids and surprisingly found they are genius designers as long as they know how to put blocks of code together and understand their potential function. They can connects different blocks to see what happens next and try different colocation one more time, which is also really important in Scratch learning not only for kids but for everyone new to it.

1) Art Lessons: Scratch has pen blocks which can draw the track of the character moving. That pen blocks can be useful in art class for students can use the pen creatively and draw on stage as they do on canvas. Teachers can teach them the functions of each pen blocks and students can try out the diverse outcome of putting different blocks together. 

2) Art Lessons: Scratch allows different characters on one same stages simultaneously and in sequence - it depends on the set of time. Students can use different characters to play a little show with the block of saying and thinking. Under teachers guide of how to use the blocks, students can feel free to set up their stage, characters and scripts and put it on scratch.

Week Eight Assignment 1

8/1 Stop Motion Animation

This is my stop motion animation based on the idea that "you can get what you want just by typing it into the machine!". To be honest, I cannot find my tripod for my phone so I had to hold the phone manually instead (sad)...

Process:

       When I came up the idea that I want to make a money machine, I started to think what kind of machine it is and what else it can do. So I chose type machine and want to record the images of I typing "money" on that machine to make money.

      Step one: Draw this machine!

I prepared a blue pen and a piece of paper and copy what type machine looks like.

      Step Two: Prepare all the thing I need in this shooting

All I need is my hand which will type the letter into the machine, money which will be the thing "coming out of the machine", and the "machine" itself.

       Step Three: Shooting!

  All you need in the beginning is moving your hand slowly and slowly to each letter and don't forget to write down the letter when you point on it.
  When you type all the five letters, put one piece of paper money to cover "money" to show the process of "making money" then record. And then put another one on the board and then record...After tens of time, thumb up to show your satisfaction！

      Step Four: Reviewing 

      Please review and double check if you record every details before you export the gif, otherwise you will find there is something missing and the action would not be as smooth as you want. If you find anything missing, record it at the same place at the same height (or if you have tripod you can just put your phone back to the tripod) then implant the pics at the place you miss. 

      Step Five: Done!!!!

      Share the gif with your friends and have hun in the process:)

Week Eight Assignment 2

8/3 Two Takeaways from reading

• Creative Coding in Art education: I truly believe that it is no need to be proficiency before we go ahead on our coding projects. Thanks to all the easily navigable coding platforms - for example, Scratch for coding beginners, Codepen.io for front-end beginners - coding is not a high-barrier skill anymore for it is not necessary to understand how computer works and binary computing, while instead what people need to learn is how to manipulate blocks of code and put them all together grammar-correctly. The simplification of code significantly saves ton of times and efforts for users to completing projects based on code and enables the possibilities of creative coding in art education - students can make their projects only by learning different functions of blocks and outcome of putting them together. The easy accessibility and operability of coding have great potential to give more freedom for students' creativity and design ability. What is more, the visuality of code - like scratch - enables students to quickly get hints on how the code works and observe where the bug is hidden. I am always wondering what will happen in the future when more and more teenagers start to learn code, even the basic Scratch. The future art work could be more digital and interactive, and maybe having more fun, like Grentch Andrew, the google search engine artist who programs her art with keywords on google search engine to grow more and more search results about her work as result. I cannot wait to see how students will make their coding designs creatively. 
  
• Using familiar materials to make unfamiliar projects: As Chris Anderson said "We are all designers now. It is time to get good at it." Design is not far away from us, no matter physically and mentally, while how to make our art work creatively is what we need to think in the next step. it is habitual to design with familiar materials and see how is the designing going well, so when I read "using conventional materials to make familiar materials to learn in unfamiliar ways", I found it is quite compelling for if we do not design in unfamiliar ways, we would all be trapped in a small box. How to define unfamiliarity and how to broaden the range of creativity in design requires scientific guide in the beginning, which means art teachers need to know how to trigger creativity and guide students to jump out of the box.

8/2 Lesson Idea for Stop Motion Animation

      Target audience: Elementary level students in art class;
      Lesson idea: Based on their travel experience, teacher can encourage them to make stop motion animation to recur one of the most memorable experience with the material of plasticine. Under the guide of teacher, students will firstly encourage students to share their travel stories to each other and evaluate the possibility of making it as stop motion animation. Then teacher will teach them how to knead the plasticine into the shape of people and buildings or landscape. Then teacher will allow each students to use their phone and stop motion app to capture the process and make it into a stop motion animation. The final step is having students show up their animation in front of class and give comment on the others.
       Lesson Object: To practice student's operational ability in playing with plasticine and story telling ability in making animation. Sharing ideas can broaden their range of imagination.

Week Seven Assignment

7/1Creative Assignment

This is the creation of the sound of environment nearby. I recorded the sound of what I heard in library, what I heard at home and what I heard in restaurant and each of them is almost 30 seconds long. While when I tried to combine these three together, I found the sound of restaurant is so loud that it covers other two sound tracks. I tried to mute the restaurant sound track a little bit but I failed.... I then recorded the instrument of me clapping my belly (LOL)with rhythm and put it in the remix.

7/2Reflection

From the sound I recorded, I felt what I heard in restaurant is super noisy while I did not pay any attention when I was sitting there talking to my friends. What I heard in library is way quieter than the sound in restaurant, but it also has a little bit uneven noise that I did not notice when I was busy working on my work. It feels like when I am focusing on my job, no matter on formal situation or not, I would not pay attention to the background noise (or music). Actually, when I heard the sound of home, I felt truly relax because I feel safe in my subconsciousness when I am at home and heard the weak background noise from streets. While when I heard the sound of restaurant, even though it is really loud and mixed with background music, people talking and laughing, it does not annoys me for it makes me feel like I am with the crowd in the gregarious society and I am not alone...I somehow love the noise sound in restaurant...

Week Six Assignment

Creative Assignment:

This is the video I created based on template of animation MV.

Future Potential of Video and What Can It Do for Art Class

1. With the practice of shooting video and editing video clips, students can learn videography and video editing skills which is valuable for their future career. They can complete the shooting and editing in group while in the progress group members would learn from each other and then on the next class, teacher can share each group's work on class and encourage them to give each other comments.

2. Video also has potential to help students practice acting before camera. Teacher can give each group one theme or they can choose their own theme and each group would create one original video based on that theme. Students will be the actor, video shooter, editor to experience the process of video production. In order to express the theme, teacher can encourage students to act in a free way to open their boundaries and be creative.

Week Five Assignment

5/1 Ebook Creation

First Book - All you need

Second Book - Disappear

5/2 Potential for Scanography in Teaching

Scanography has great potential in art education to encourage creativity and collaboration. Teachers can ask students to make scanography together in a group of two to three students (like what we did in class) with items each from there belongings or their bodies. Then each group can share their work in front of the class and play an activity of guess which items consist of that scanography. Because scanopraghy is really easy to make and it saves more space for individual creativity in the process than digital photography which only pictures what is in reality, it allows teachers to guide students practice scanography in the class with limited time or even students can do scanography at any place or time to practice their own ideas without traditional tutorial to restrict their creativity.

5/3 3 Takeaways from the section readings

• digital remixing: I did not notice we are in an age of remixing until I read this reading. Photoshop, Imovie, Voice Editor and other applications are already embedded in our daily life and creation. It's also an important part of culture in that internationalisation opens the boundary of perspective to view our own culture. Remixing does not mean blending two things into one thing but beyond; it means changing what is deeply rooted in our culture and adding something new to fit it into new world.
• old forms re-envisioned: The new technologies enables youth to re-design, re-create, re-decorate, and remix traditional art forms and generate new ideas and forms of art based on the tradition. Because of the limitation of find arts in virtual forms or other formats, there is somehow a sort of gap between formal arts and popular culture youth favorite. While the re-envision closes the gap, and adds the sustainability of art in virtual art, dance, music to pass on through generations. The re-envision itself also makes it sharable to others and therefore, invites more youth to re-create old art forms to "new art" that fits in the spirit of time.
• digital storytelling: Other than traditional storytelling practices in education, students can use stock media and new technologies to creative powerful storytelling in a new way.  For example, imovie, Adobe Premier, Adobe Special Effects and other filmmaking softwares enables students to edit their videos in their personal computer without extra efforts in screening, and cutting films manually on special machines. And photography can be edited by photoshops and collected in flipsnack.com to make ebooks, which saves much more time in manual editing and gives more space in creativity. I feel it is really lucky to be born in this digital age and have more practices in digital creativity.

Week Four Assignment

Creative Assignment

Idea 1

The idea is that what's in the mirror reflects something that does not show up in reality. In this case, I use SpongeBob and Patrick Star to show that mirror can reflect supernatural things in a musing way.

Idea 2

In the second post, I cutout the mirror reflection and thought eyes can also reflect what we saw so that I start to think, why can't the mirror be an eye ball? So I choose a night-ish background that has different tone than the daytime mirror and set it as an pupil with cartoon face.

Then I showed the ideas to my boyfriend, what he answered is kind of out of my surprise - he said he can understand the first idea while he had trouble in understanding the second one for the pupil is too small to see clearly what's inside. He mentioned that the first idea is sort of "all of a sudden" that there is no comparison of the difference of what is inside the mirror and outside the mirror.

In order to show this is a magic mirror that can reflect things differently, I some illustrator of sponge, starfish and a shirt to show that mirror give life to all those static stuff.

Impact 25

My teammates: Yuke and Yiting. After brainstorming for one-whole week, we finally narrow down the impact to teach people to not to fiddle their phone while walking. So we want to play one pedestrian to show the unintended consequence of "blink walking" and film the other passersby's reaction.

 

Digital Photography

1: For Physics Education: In order to make students understand image principle of camera, teachers can ask them to equip with camera or phone with camera and picture photos from near to far to see the digital image change.

2: For Art Education: In order to help them practice photoshop and design, teacher can ask them to photo two images during the weekend, no matter indoor or outdoor, selfie or landscape, and then, teach them how to collage the two images all the together by photoshop. At the end of class, ask them to share their collage with each other and describe their ideas.

3: For Liberal Education: In order to encourage students to write more and make up stories, teacher can ask students to take a photo that they think include a story, or at least a piece of it. After collecting all the photos, teacher can randomly allocate each student a photo and then encourage them to write a story about what the picture implies based on their own imagination.