Challenging Student Creativity with Great Results: iPad Camp at ACOA

Artwork created in Procreate by iPad Camp student

The last full week in July was iPad Camp at the Academy Center of the Arts in Lynchburg. This was an especially wonderful group of kids. There were 3 boys and 3 girls. That turns out to be a great balance of energy and skills. The girls were older and more focused, the boys were younger and higher energy.  These camps provide kids with an opportunity to challenge their creative problem solving skills by learning media production tools in a non-structured environment. I am most appreciative of ACOA efforts to develop arts/technology programming.

Museum Studies Students Share the Love @MaierMuseum

Lynchburg, Virginia is very lucky to have the Maier Museum of Art at Randolph College. This is an exceptional college art museum with a very interesting collection, provocative exhibitions and active arts education programs for the Randolph students as well as K-12 students in the area.

One selection of supplies for making Valentines at the Maier.

Yesterday the Museum Studies students hosted a family event for making Valentines, part of their annual two-part celebration of art and artists, centered around the mood and aesthetics of Valentine’s Day.  This year’s Love at the Maier was held in conjunction with the current exhibition, Venetian Visions: Selections from the National Gallery, London, on view through March 31, 2016.

10 Things to Know About iArt4Kidz

iArt4Kidz is a new brand of Kristin Harris Design. We pulled our preschool media products out to rebrand with a name more reflective of our products. We are focusing on iOS apps with a special interest in art and nature.

1. Our Talent

I am an artist. I have been making art for over 40 years. The last 25 years I have worked with some amazingly creative people to produce animated media for preschool kids. I'd like to introduce my team, provide some samples of our work and talk about why we do what we do.

Black Broadway on U: A Living History Experience

I recently had the opportunity to hear Shellée Haynesworth, creator and executive producer of Black Broadway on U speak at Randolph College. Her talk was part of the Sara Driver '77 Digital Filmmaking and Lecture Series, funded by Martha Driver '50 and Al Driver.

 

This fall I had reconnected with Shellée, a fellow member of Women in Film & Video (DC) and was very excited to hear about this new venture. I was very curious to learn what had sparked this multi-platform project to connect today’s audiences to the contributions of prominent and pioneering Black Washington entertainers, educators, civil rights activists, intellectuals, musicians and culturists. What I was to learn is that not only was there a family connection for Shellée, a third generation Washingtonian but also national significance of this community in Washington DC that was centered around U Street.

#MetKids: Robust Resource for Families and Schools

It is hard, I will reveal my prejudice, not to consider the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC the ultimate art museum. It is the largest museum in the United States and one of the most visited in the world. There are more than 2 million pieces in their collection. In September, 2015 they launched a new digital web-based product, #MetKids. Come with me as I explore this new resource designed for kids between 7 and 12 years old.

Photo Credit: Arad, Wikipedia, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported

Here is the relatively simple interface for what promises to be a broad and deep offering of treats for families.

Tough Gig: Creating Meaningful Media for Today's Classroom

Fairfax County Public School Digital Media Producers

Many of us grew up with a tradition of lecture based instructional media with little or no interactive engagement with students. All this has changed dramatically, thanks to the internet, YouTube and more sophisticated approaches to how students learn. How do all the pieces fit together in one of the largest school systems in the country?

To set the stage, the Fairfax County public school system is the number 1 employer in Virginia with 188,000 students and 24,000 employees. They move more people a day than the Greyhound Bus system. FCPS Digital Media Production has 14 full time employers with 800 projects per year, ranging from PSA's to hourly programming. The subject matter is educational, public information and professional development with some content for broadcast while other programming goes directly to the web. Fairfax Network is the distribution arm for educational programming that is grade level or curriculum specific. The FCPS's YouTube channel has 1238 videos.Their work is 93% grant funded and some of their many educational partners include the Smithsonian, National Archives, Library of Congress, Mount Vernon and NASA. These partners may provide funding but always provide subject matter expertise.

How YouTube is Advancing Science Education

Kristin Reiber Harris
KristinHarrisDesign.com

Science education is something we can all agree is important. How are producers and educators making sense of the current landscape and helping students learn? Media producers have watched the industry change by leaps and bounds in the last 20 years. In the 90's it was a miracle to get anything to happen on a dial up connection. Now we take HD streaming for granted. Producers get left in the dust if they are don't keep up with the state of the art, all while they get older (even the young ones) and audiences get younger with changing tastes and preferences. These are some of the issues Dan Sonnett, video producer and owner of Sonnett Media Group, LLC discussed at a recent meeting of the The Women in Film & Video (EdCM) Education & Children's Media Roundtable. Dan is a long time contractor with the Smithsonian's National Natural History Museum were is currently Sr. Video Producer and Science Communicator.
 

TV is Broken
Dan set the stage for our conversation by reminding us that TV is broken. He had fascinating statistics about what, why and when kids are access online video. YouTube has over 1 billion users. In March of 2015, YouTube attracted 31.8 million users aged 18 to 24 (98% of the U.S internet users in that age bracket). All this is very important data for media producers. In a nut shell, kids are spending lots of time online and jumping around, probably while multi-tasking. This is not really much of a surprise. How does this relate to education? In addition to teens liking the online video offerings, teachers do too. They provide visual demonstrations or evidence and can clearly dramatize events and concepts. The videos are short which is a good match for student attention spans.

Must See 2013 Ken Robinson TED Talk

The beauty of TED talks is that most of them are excellent and well crafted. If you are an educator you probably know about Ken Robinson and his work. He is brilliantly inspiring and a gifted, humorous presenter. His advice about what makes education work reflects common sense and insight. Hopefully he can play a part in sparking the revolution that might just change things and engage the children who are being "left behind".

Please take the 20 minutes required to watch this video.

Thanks to Garr Reynolds to bringing this to my attention.


Kristin Reiber Harris

I am an artist, media producer and educator. Information about my work can be found at KristinHarrisDesign.com. The focus of my current work is iPad apps for young children introducing art treasures  through animated, interactive narratives.

Life Wrangling 31 iPads

Kristin Reiber Harris

Last May I was invited to be the technology coordinator for the eArts Initiative at Lynchburg College. I develop iOS apps, have been an adjunct professor in the Art Department at the college and had actively pursued iPads for my Va Governor's School of Math, Science and Technology media production class. I was thrilled to be involved. The result, thanks to the Virginia Foundation for Independent College and those at LC who procured the grant, was an array of technology tools for education which included the 30 iPads I would shepherd through the Fall semester. (The 31st is my own.)

As a media producer I had found iPads wonderful tools for creating and distributing media. I was looking forward to being able to share this enthusiasm with my fellow faculty members at the college, students in Gov School, LC students and the kids who participated in the art workshops at the Daura Gallery.

Sugata Mitra: SOLEs and the Future of Education

If you don't know about Sugata Mitra's research, I hope to remedy that right now. I spent a recent Sunday immersed in Mitra's many online video presentations, mesmerized by the results of his research with kids and technology. My favorite and the most succinct of these is this TED talk. I just watched it again for the 3th time.

This is a 20 minute presentation, which you may not have the time to jump into now, so let me summarize some of the highlights for you.  As the winner of the 2013 TED Prize, he received one million dollars to implement his theories as outlined in this presentation.

His topic in this video presentation is the Future of Education.  Sugata suggests that the current system evolved about 300 years ago in Victorian England. The British were able to manage one of the largest Empires in history without computers, telephones or airplanes with hand written data on pieces of paper. What they did have was a bureaucratic administrative machine.  They created schools to generate the manpower to run this bureaucratic administrative machine. The students needed to become identical. They needed to write alike because the data was hand written. They needed to be able to read and do math in their heads. They needed to be identical so they could be moved from New Zealand to Canada and be instantly functional.

The world of Victorian England does not exist anymore. What does that mean for education? What's next? It's not even that the schools are broken, they were actually very well designed and are working as designed. The problem is that they are outdated. 

Mitra's research began while he was teaching programming in New Delhi. He wanted to find out how slum children, who played beside the school where he taught, would interact with a computer. He sealed a computer and mouse in a wall of the slums beside his office and left it there for the children. Only instructing them that they could play with it if they wanted and that he was going away. When he came back 8 hours later, they were browsing the internet.

Concerned that someone had shown the kids (some as young as 6 years old) how to use the mouse, Mitra moved his experiments to much more remote villages in India to remove the possibility of the kids getting help from computer savvy adults.  One group of children after a couple of months complained that they wanted a better mouse and a faster processor. They lamented that they had had to teach themselves English in order to play the games.

Mitra's attention is captured by this idea that they had taught themselves. Their progress was clearly based on motivation and sharing information. He wanted to settle this question of the children teaching themselves with an absurd proposition. He put a computer in a Tamil speaking community and loaded it with information in English about DNA replication. He assumed he would leave the computer after a baseline test of the children's knowledge of DNA, come back for additional testing that would just replicate the initial scores of 0%. However that's not what happened. Eventually with only passive assistance the scores reached 50%. 

Among his conclusions is that knowing is obsolete. If you need to know, you find out. Encouragement is the key to learning. The new role of the teacher is to ask the big questions and provide encouragement. This shifts the focus of education away from the threat of punishment/exams which have a tendency to shut down the brain.

Mitra's wish for the future is SOLEs, self organized learning environments. The teacher poses the questions and admires the answers. He has documented in his research how he has seen this process work. He challenges us is to set up these kinds of learning environments and share the results with others. He was awarded one million dollars from TED to implement his wish. You can get the SOLE Toolkit here.

Sugata Mitra's studies revolved around kids much younger than college students but these findings are certainly relevant for all levels of education.  How can we use this information in our classrooms? What are you already doing that supports his theories?

Please watch the TED presentation above and hear him present his ideas. He is much more articulate than my paraphrasing. 

Here are some websites with information about his work.
http://www.ncl.ac.uk/ecls/staff/profile/sugata.mitra
http://www.hole-in-the-wall.com/
http://sugatam.blogspot.com/

GovSchoolWeek1--Great Group of Students

Saturday was the end of classes for week 1 of the Virginia Governor's Residential School of Math, Science and Technology at Lynchburg College. I've had a chance to get to know the students and we've made huge progress in getting everyone launched on their own animation project.

You'd think I lived in the lab for the amount of gear I bring to class every day.

It's really nice to see how the students bond to each other quickly and all seem to be having a really good time. I really appreciate how happy they all seem and how much they are focusing on their work. 

I have to encourage all of the students to take a break, they are so focused. Austin, Ezzy, Ryan and Adriana.

I like to start the students off with really simple blank keyframe projects, either lightning or fireworks, so they really grasp the idea of working on a timeline. Many of them had done video editing, which of course deals with the same issues. Next were sequential keyframes to build animation that replicated building a castle brick by brick.  It seems a bit odd to feel so strongly that this is a great way to introduce Flash because I am quite sure they will never use either of these techniques exclusively to produce an animation again.

These two simple animation projects completed, next step is to develop their own animated character short, very short. Out come the notebooks for conceptualizing and a sketches. This always takes some work on my part to get students interested in thinking about what they want to do away from the computer. They generally want to jump right in. I certainly understand, that's human nature. This is an important step, I love these notebooks and the opportunities they offer to chill and let the ideas percolate.

Ryan working on this animation.

These are some of the shorts that I have the students watch as they are thinking about doing their own project.  PIxar's Luxo and another an ad which is also credited to Pixar. Brilliantly funny and entertaining and great examples of a great story told in a few minutes or less.

 

 

It was interesting to see the themes that evolved for the student shorts.  A few little love stories, some with human characters, others with inanimate objects. There is a space wars themes and one or two that relate recycling. We had some interesting discussions about parody and watched a very clever stop motion video, Grocery Store Wars by Free Range Studios. Not sure how much Free Range Studios is still working with Flash, but they have a wonderful archive of work that I love to show the students. They are extremely clever with high production values.

Veronica is definitely one of the most skillful artists in the group.

Looking forward to Week 2. The students will "finish" these projects and we'll talk about interactivity and start working on the iPads.

Gallery One Reason to go to Cleveland

Last week I read this article about the Cleveland Art Museum in the New York Times right before I went to bed. When I woke up in the morning, I thought what I was remembering about the article was a dream.  The Cleveland Art Museum has created a state of the art interface of technology and art that is stunning, family friendly and truly enhances the accessibility of their collection, both on and off site. This endeavors is a quantum leap into the future.  Pivotal to the development of this technology paradise are museum director, David Franklin, a $10 million gift from the Maltz Family Foundation and Local Projects, a Manhattan interactive design firm. 

The Collection Wall in Gallery One consists of over 150 Christie MicroTiles, displaying over 23 million pixels or the equivalant of twenty-three 720p HDTVs. This is the largest multi-touch screen in the United States.The wall alternately displays 3,500 images from their collection changing every 10 minutes.  The images are grouped by theme, time period, materials and techniques. There are also 32 curated selections from the collection that are displayed. Visitors can select various images that they want to see and create a tour for themselves while at the museum. The images are downloaded to their iPad while it is docked at the screen. This also provides the museum with data about which images are of most interest to their visitors.

That's not all, folks. That's really just the beginning. Gallery One has six interactive workstations(referred to as a Lens), each with it's own computer/monitor and unique twist on finding and interpreting artworks from their collection. The Sculpture Lens has two features; Make a Face and Strike a Pose. A visitor contorts her face into a specific gesture and the Sculpture Lens finds one of 189 works of art that replicate that gesture. Strike a Pose presents a sculpture and the visitor is asked to replicate the pose and their success is documented on the screen.

Visitor at the Make A Face kiosk with artwork from the collection that mimics her expression.

Stories Lens also has two components. Find the Origin presents 3 archetypes and challenges visitor to find analogous stories in historical or popular culture.Tell A Story features Perseus as seen in a near by tapestry. The story is to be retold in comic book style with added speech bubbles and text. Global Lens addresses the issue of multi-cultural influence on art and tests the visitor ability to detect country/cultures of influence. Their website provides a description of all six of the interactive offerings.  All as robust as the aforementioned.

The Director's Tour of Ancient, Medieval and African Art on the ArtLens app

I downloaded the ArtLens app, another component of their Gallery One offerings. Brilliantly it has functionality off site.  I just watched a tour narrated by museum director David Franklin of some of his favorite objects from the collection, the first being a beautiful marble scuplture from Turkey dating back to the 3rd millennium BC, enchantingly titled "The Stargazer". This 10 object tour cycles through an photograph of the object and a two minute video that displays the object with narration by Franklin. The tours are informative in terms of getting a feel for their collection but the real payoff is using ArtLens at the museum. It has the capability of scanning the artwork you are standing in front of and offers additional interpretive content. Visitors can share favorite works of art with both Twitter and Facebook from the app.

I can't wait to experience this marriage of art and technology in person. Thank you Cleveland Art Museum for all of the thoughtful time and energy that has gone into this effort and congratulations.

MoMA's Art Lab Shines

MOMA's Art Lab is tucked away in their education building. I had not been aware of it on previous visits. I was particularly interested in seeing the facility before I meet Cari Frisch in April at the Sandbox Summit. My efforts were well rewarded. Cari was kind enough to put me on the staff guest list and I spent a wonderful afternoon with Queena, Bek and numerous families at the Art Lab.

 
The education facility at MoMA is extensive. The Art Lab is on the ground level and designed for young children. Downstairs are multiple classroom studios for older students. There is also exhibit space so I was able to see examples of the kinds of projects they do with the older visitors.

Create Ability is a seven year old arts program for children and adults with learning or developmental disabilities and their families. This is only one of the numerous programs offered.

The ArtLab is a bright space that is very inviting with one long wall of windows. On an annual basis, the space is configured for a specific theme. This year the theme is people. At the entrance an animated segment with letters projected on the wall and configured into various faces entices little visitors. Actually, the space is designed for families. I was visiting in the early afternoon so, it was not too surprising that the children I saw we're all very young, some as young as a year old. The space is well designed to accommodate visitors of all ages.

Still from the animation that greets visitors to the Art Lab.

The first project on the wall as you enter the room is a large set of magnetized letters that can be arranged into faces. This kind of activity is replicated with many different materials at other locations in the room. There are blocks, laminated cards and drawing stations.

I could not resist playing with the letters myself. It was fun, the magnetized letters were large enough for small hands to manipulate and "sticky" enough to move around without undo effort but also securely stay in place.

One of my favorite games is exquisite corpse (wish it had another name). Their version was very clever. Three small doors are affixed to the wall, stacked on top of each other. This allows the player to make a head drawing and conceal it while a fellow player would draw the body, etc. Most of the little visitors when I was there were still into scribbling, but that didn't stop them from wanting to participate.

 
I am always on the look out for good ideas for the children's workshops I conduct at The Daura Gallery at Lynchburg College. The Art Lab provided inspiration on many levels but of special interest was a unique activity I would like to replicate. They constructed a shadow puppet theater and a workstation for making shadow puppets out of chop sticks and black construction paper. I am a huge fan of Indonesian shadow puppets. This activity would be a great opportunity to introduce children to that tradition. It was very helpful to see how they had constructed the theater. They may not have used plexiglas, but it could be made with plexiglas, tracing paper and a few reflectors and bright bulbs. I am envisioning asking the kids to come up with a story idea, probably for efficiency sake, a fairy or folk tale known to all, and then have them go to work making the puppets. I can also envision having the effort video tapped, why not...if it works.

Shadow puppets waiting to be called to action.  They are hanging on the window that faces the Sculpture Garden I walked through to get to the Art Lab.

Queena Ko was the arts educator/facilitator I spoke with when I first arrived. It was fun to realize we are both UCLA art school grads, she much more recently than I. Her co-worker Bek is from Australia working at the MoMA for 6 months. She is an arts educator in Sydney. Both young women were very friendly and helpful. Another pleasant conversation was with Sori and her mother. Sori is 20 months old and this is her second visit to the Art Lab. She was having a grand time putting together card faces and seemed to enjoy handing me cards!

I enjoyed talking to Sori and her mother while they made faces with smartly laminated cards
with photos of a large variety of objects.

Lucky toddlers and up who live close enough to the museum to make this a regular playground.

Art To Tell Stories and More

I am heading off to NYC in a few days.  My trips to New York has been exciting and formative over the years. In my family, it was the tradition that our father took us on a short trip to NYC when we were 10 years old.  I am especially anticipating this visit because I have two destinations that tie directly into my current app development; the Brooklyn Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. 

• China, Wine Vessel (Zun) in the Form of a Goose, 206 B.C.E.-220 C.E. Bronze, 11 1/2 x 6 3/16 x 17 1/2 in. (29.2 x 15.7 x 44.5 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn Museum photograph

Recently I discovered that the Brooklyn Museum has made available for download and use many images from their collection. These images are available with a Creative Commons-BY license. This means I am free to adapt their images and share them with this license as long as I credit the museum. What a boon to media developers.  Congratulations to the Brooklyn Museum and other institutions who are doing the same.  The Portland  Art Museum is another resource I am tapping for this project. Both the Brooklyn Museum and the Portland Art Museum have extensive collections of ancient Chinese and ancient Egyptian art.

China, Eastern Han period (25–220 CE),earthenware
The Arlene and Harold Schnitzer Collection of Early Chinese Art, Portland Art Museum

Since my trip to China in 2011, I have intensified my study of Chinese art history.  The Asian Art Museum (in San Francisco) has a very extensive offering of art history lectures on iTunesU.  At one point I realized I had watched over 45 hours of lectures about Chinese art history focusing on the Shang, Zhou, Qin and Han dynasties. I am fascinated by the early bronze sculpture and especially intrigued at how accessible they are for children. There are so many animal objects that reflect not only a realism and love of the creatures, but are humorous and delightfully entertaining. Case in point is the goose at the top of this article and the hedgehog below. It does add to the mystic for me that these objects were made over two thousand years ago.

Egypt, Hedgehog, ca. 1938-1700 B.C.E. Faience, 1 5/8 x 1 5/8 x 2 13/16 in. (4.2 x 4.1 x 7.1 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Charles Edwin Wilbour Fund, 65.2.1. Creative Commons-BY

My project, which is designed for very young children, involves finding a selection of these animals and bringing them together in a story with animated components that bring the animals to life. I am working with sculpture from ancient China and ancient Egypt. Why these objects for this age group?  I am a great believer in introducing children to artwork from around the world to better understand of our shared history, our shared human experience.  I am also a great believer in starting this process as early as possible.

ABC Egyptian Art from The Brooklyn Museum of Art

The first book I bought for my daughter when she was a baby, ironically, was the ABC Egyptian Art from The Brooklyn Musueum. I was surprised to discover that it is still in print, originally published in April of 1988, a few months after she was born. 

I am making connections with the Education Departments at these museum to brainstorm about how to add to their efforts to make their collection available to children everywhere, regardless of whether they can come to the museum in person or not. As an educator and artist living in a small community in Central VA (after years in the DC area) I seek out those arts institutions that are invested in making their collections and exhibitions available online.  The Metropolitan Museum of Art, another greatly anticipated destination this trip, has innumerable online resources for accessing their collection. Their new series 82nd & Fifth is a collection of short videos of artwork selected by curators to document work that has been significant to them. There are currently 16 in the series building to a total of 100. While at the Met I will be spending a lot of time in their Chinese galleries. 

I will also visit the MoMA Art Lab.  Not directly related to my current project, but I am looking forward to meeting Cari Frisch at the Sandbox Summit in April and would love to drop in and say hey while I am there.  I am a huge fan of MoMA's online presence. Their exhibition On Line with this virtual component has been a part of my college level drawing curriculum for a few years.


I am finding a robust and diverse collection of objects to incorporate into stories that introduce young children to artistic expression that has been a part of the human experience for thousands of years. This makes me very happy.  I am looking forward to sharing these stories soon.

Kids, Art and Old Technology

When I was a kid, my father set up a temporary darkroom for us in an extra bathroom.
As I watched my first photographic images become visible in the developer I was mesmerized.  I thought it was magic. Children these days have much easier access to taking and manipulating images with digital cameras and cell phones. However, nothing quite compares to the excitement and magic of the dark room and working with film.

My cyanotype #2.  It's a branch from the  ginko maple tree...

Old photographic technologies have a place today. The Maier Museum of Art at Randolph College offered a family workshop recently, "Sun Prints" for making cards for Valentine's Day.  The workshop was organized by Mac Cosgrove-Davies as part of the Maier's Love at the Maier holiday celebration.  It was also in conjunction with their current exhibition, Modern Movement: Arthur B. Davies Figurative Works on Paper from the Randolph College and Mac Cosgrove-Davies Collections.  

Mac explaining the process of making cyanotypes while my prints are being exposed.
photo Lisa Cosgrove-Davies

Mac is Arthur B. Davies' great-grandson and an artist, photographer and woodworker himself.  So it was a natural fit for him to offer a program about sun prints, or cyanotypes for the Maier community.  One of his cyanotypes is included in the exhibition. This is a wonderful way to introduce children to the chemistry of photography and the concept of photo sensitivity in a very accessible activity. I am particularly attracted to the color blue or Prussian blue that is associated with cyanotypes. They are frequently associated with botanical imagery which is another reason I am attracted to the genre. 

When I met Mac I told him I was considering doing a similar workshop at the Daura Gallery at Lynchburg College. Mac was very helpful in explaining this process.  I was excited to jump in and make my own prints. The process is relatively straight forward and very similar to the photo silk screens I had made years ago. Equal amounts of potassium ferricyanide and ferric ammonium citrate are mixed together. This photosensitive solution is brushed on paper and left to dry in a dark place.  Mac did this before the workshop. 

The prints are assembled in the Maier storage room.
photo Lisa Cosgrove-Davies

He arrived with a lovely selection of dried leaves and flowers that were arranged on a table for easy selection.  Another table was set up with wooden frames, glass inserts and clamps to hold the specimen down during exposure. A piece of the paper that had the photosensitive emulsion was placed on the back of the frame, a plant or other objects were placed on the paper and carefully clamped into the frame. The frames were then taken outside to be exposed to sun light.  Those areas of the paper that are covered by the plants keep that paper from being exposed to the UV light. After exposure, in my case about 20 minutes, the print is put in a solution to be developed and then washed is a running water bath. The uncovered or exposed areas of the paper experience a chemical reaction which results in a vivid blue reversed image. You don't get the fully saturated color until the print has dried.

Prints drying outside the Maier Museum.
photo Lisa Cosgrove-Davies

This process was discovered by English scientist and astronomer Sir John Herschel in 1842. It was his friend Anna Atkins who incorporated this procedure with photography and is considered to be the first female photographer. She make a series of cyanotype books and documented ferns and her seaweed collection. I find her work very inspiring.  

Anna Atkins from her 1843 book, Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions
Courtesy of the New York City Public Library

As I mentioned Mac Cosgrove-Davies is a photographer and he was kind enough to share some of his own work with the participants of the workshop.  Here are a few samples.

Mac Cosgrove-Davies, Three Knives and a Pear

Mac Cosgrove-Davies, Rwandan Children

In researching this old photographic process, I discovered that there is another similar process called anthotype, using fruit and vegetable juices that are made into dyes and coated on paper.  What kind of old photographic techniques have you used?

I Am Going to Sandbox Summit

Sandbox Summit: Pixel the Possiblities, Nurturing Kids Imagination in the Digital Age in Cambridge, MA this April is a conference about helping kids use technology not as passive participants but as innovative creators.  I am very excited to have registered for this event and am thrilled to rub elbows with the academics, educators, industry professionals and writers who focus on how kids play, how they learn, ubiquitous technology and what all this means today and in the future.  A big order?  Perhaps.

In researching the conference I found videos of some of last years speakers.  This comment from Heather Chaplin, Assistant Professor of Journalism at The New School made an impression.  As a child someone had said to her, "Show me the games your children play and I will show you the next 100 years."  It is humbling and inspiring to remember that what we do today, ie what we teach and share with our children has consequences for a very long time.

This is how the co-founders are framing this event. "From a simple line drawing to conceptualizing in the fourth dimension, the way content is envisioned, presented, and received affects the way kids play, learn, and communicate. Our focus this year is to look at the best ways to actively engage kids, to promote playful learning using 21^st century tools," said Wendy Smolen , cofounder of Sandbox Summit. Cofounder Claire Green adds "Kids may not come with instructions, but they are loaded with imagination. As educators, product developers and parents, it is our job to harness all the resources available to keep imagination at the forefront of play and learning."

Who am I especially interested in meeting/hearing?  Two come to mind right away.  The brothers Jib Jab and Cari Frisch Associate Educator, Family Programs, Department of Education, The Museum of Modern Art.

JibJab came onto my radar during the election in 2004. I have spent a lot of time creating media in Flash and teaching Flash.  This collage style of animation is one that I find compelling as a creator and viewer.  Of course this piece of political satire was pure delight.  

One of the first apps I downloaded was JibJab's StoryBot.  A important features of this app is that kids/readers can add their own photo to the story to become the main character. I had tons of fun playing with the book The Biggest Pizza Ever.  An incredibly humorous and inventive story about a little girl who makes the biggest pizza ever and the consequences. The animation and the audio effects are brilliant.  A very imaginative and entertaining experience.

 MOMA is one of the giants in the world of art museums.  I recently reviewed their exhibition Century of the Child: Growing in Design, 1900 - 2000. MOMA app AB EX NY is a inspiring document that features images, video, essays and more about the Abstract Expressionists and NYC history.  The work and the artist come alive in a truly engaging experience. Cari Frisch has been with MOMA since 2005 and played a role in their recently released art app for kids. I am looking forward to hearing Cari talk about her experiences at MOMA and what we can do to help children see art as a window on their world. My app development focuses on these concerns.

I am a docent at the Maier Museum at Randolph College and provide workshops for kids at Lynchburg College, where I also teach traditional college-aged students.  I see little difference in the techniques that spark the creative fires of my younger friends and the college students I teach. A willingness to play, make mistakes and learn from others are characteristics of creativity for all ages that come to mind immediately.