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.