The Art of Teaching Media Arts

Catalog description

Using a variety of media arts tools, students create their own hands-on, project-based learning curriculum that integrates science, technology, engineering, math and arts, often called STEAM. Students explore how principles of science, mathematics, visual arts, music, and computation can be utilized in media arts and design and how to translate these principles into project-based learning curriculum. Aimed at future and current educators and community leaders from many disciplines who teach in a variety of formal and informal settings, including schools, libraries, community centers, after-school and outreach programs. Course activities provide exposure to, and foundational knowledge of, many resources available to the community including creative coding languages, open source media-making tools, makerspace tools and hardware. Students use these tools while carefully reflecting on larger ideas of interdisciplinary learning principles of creativity, community, problem-solving, empathy, embodied learning, collaboration and aesthetics. STEAM education provides avenues for learners to explore complex or difficult societal or science issues in an embodied way, either through providing explicit artistic or expressive end-goals that require computational means to achieve, or by providing approachable metaphors or embodied actions which allow the student to more closely relate to the complex issues. Emphasizes using widely accessible cross-platform and open source (free) tools.