From Physical Computing to IoT: Education for Fostering Creativity by Reasoning about Material, Structure, Relationship, and Computing

Abstract

Art and technology convergence is often suggested to be a plausible direction toward education to foster student creativity. An education program applied to teenage students in the convergence between art and technology is illustrated in this paper. Beyond using science and technology as only implementation tools for building works of art, one could develop rich context and narratives by the conceptually connected topics between art and technology. The educational program described in this paper has focused on conceptual development in such convergence. Students are provided with tools to realize interactivity using Arduino. Students were taught to reason about material, structures, relationship, and computing in the context of Physical Computing where methods of connecting analog world and digital world is sought for. Students are required to build their interactive media installations in order to deliver their thought processes. The result shows remarkable increase in their level of creativity measured by TTCT. Since artistic intuition could contribute to the performance of creativity, we suggest implicit(or talk-less) knowledge by M. Polanyi in order to strengthen the conceptual foundation of Physical Computing. We then point out that approaches of manipulating implicit knowledge would assist to new inventions in the Internet of Things(IoT) where creative challenge in connecting things and computation is desirable.