Digital Materials

(Guest Artist: Sean Justice)

-Digital materials can become available to metaphor, storytelling, and art
production
-Computational materials: phones, ink jet printers, etc.
This week:
Electronics:
-Playing with electronics
-Carrying metaphor through electronics, storytelling
(Next week: Digital 3D modeling, 3D printing)
Whenever you interact with something is new, you need to establish a
relationship with it
Electronics is one of these things
-Introduce materials:
-See what starts to happen, play with them, engage with partners
-New material- engage with independently
-Then engage with material with prompt attached to it
Exploration:
Battery & Light Bulb:
-Name the affects feelings
-Excitement comes out of the material organically
-Objective was clear, but not given as a task (still very much explorationwhat we know about light bulbs gave us the objective)
-Partnership work built trust and collaboration
Sentence construction:
-Together construct a sentence about what happened
-Did you use science words or not?
-Circuit comes from circle- the key shape in this exploration
-Did metaphors emerge?
*Reflection Note:
Weve done this kind of things in science- an experiment
But here it was just the same as our other explorations- playing with
materials
*This kind of exploration/ activity builds the sense of wonder:
-Looking closely
-Wondering
-Asking questions

*Our goal: To engage kids in a question they want to investigate and

wonder about
*How do we make these self-directed wonderings available to children?
*Today we explored simple materials in an environment where you were
open to bring metaphors through = full engagement and wonder
LED Lights & Electric Origami:
-More targeted exploration, more specific vocabulary
1. Make it light up
2. Make it not light up
3. Figure out why
-With LED light, electricity can flow in one direction
-This was easier, so it was second- more difficult things make wonder more
available
Electric origami:
-Paper and electronics coming together- with an open-ended relationship