This week will complete the series devoted to a new Mathematics and Digital Art (MDA) course I’ll be teaching for the first time this Fall. During the semester, I’ll be posting regularly about the course progression for those interested in following along.
Continuing from the previous post, Weeks 7 and 8 will be devoted to polyhedra. While not really a topic under “digital art,” so much of the art at Bridges and similar conferences is three-dimensional that I think it’s important that students are familiar with a basic three-dimensional geometric vocabulary.
Moreover, I’ve taught laboratory-based courses on polyhedra since the mid 1990’s, and I’ve also written a textbook for such a course. So there will be no problem coming up with ideas. Basic topics to cover are the Platonic solids (and proofs that there are only five), Euler’s formula, and building models with paper (including unit origami) and Zometools.
There are also over 50 papers in the Bridges archive on polyhedra. One particularly interesting one is by Reza Sarhangi about putting patterns on polyhedra (link here). Looking at this paper will allow an interested student to combine the creation of digital art and the construction of polyhedra.
At the end of Week 7, the proposal for the Final Project will be due. During Week 8, I’ll have one of the days be devoted to a construction project, which will give me time to go around to students individually and comment on their proposals.
This paves the way for the second half of the semester, which is largely focused on Processing and work on Final Projects.
In Weeks 9 and 10, the first two class periods will be devoted to work on Processing. I recently completed a six-part series on making movies with Processing (see Day039–Day044), beginning with a very simple example of morphing a dot from one color to another.
These blog posts were written especially for MDA, so we’ll begin our discussion of Processing by working through those posts. You’ll notice the significant use of IFS, which is why there were such an important emphasis during the first half of the course. But as mentioned in the post on Day044, the students in my linear algebra course got so excited about the IFS movie project, I’m confident we’ll have a similar experience in MDA.
The third class in Weeks 9 and 10 will be devoted to work on the Final Project. Not only does taking the class time to work on these projects emphasize their importance, but I get to monitor students’ progress. Their proposals will include a very rough week-by-week outline of what they want to accomplish, so I’ll use that to help me gauge their progress.
What these work days also allow for is troubleshooting and possibly revising the proposals along the way. This is an important aspect of any project, as it is not always possible to predict one’s progress — especially when writing code is involved! But struggling with writing and debugging code is part of the learning process, so students should learn to be comfortable with the occasional bug or syntax error. And recall that I’ll have my student Nick as an assistant in the classroom, so there will be two of us to help students on these work days.
Week 11 will be another Presentation Week, again largely based on the Bridges archives. However, I’ll give students more latitude to look at other sources of interest if they want. Again, we’re looking for breadth here, so students will present papers on topics not covered in class or the first round of presentations.
I wanted to have a week here to break up the second half of the semester a bit. Students will still include this week in their outline — they will be expected to continue working on their project as well. But I am hoping that they find these Presentation Weeks interesting and informative. Rather like a mini-conference in the context of the usual course.
Weeks 12 and 13 will essentially be like Weeks 9 and 10. Again, given that most students will not have written any code before this course, getting them to make their own movies in Processing will take time. There is always the potential that we’ll get done with the basics early — but there is no shortage of topics to go into if needed. But I do want to make sure all students experience some measure of success with making movies in Processing.
Week 14 will be the Final Project Presentation Week. This is the culminating week of the entire semester, where students showcase what they’ve created during the previous five weeks. Faculty from mathematics, computer science, art, and design will be invited to these presentations as well. I plan to have videos made of the presentations so that I can show some highlights on my blog.
Week 15 is reserved for Special Topics. There are just two days in this last week, which is right before Final Exams. I want to have a low-key, fun week where we still learn some new ideas about mathematics and art after the hard work is already done.
So that’s Mathematics and Digital Art! The planning process has been very exciting, and I’m really looking forward to teaching the course this fall.
Just keep the two “big picture” ideas in mind. First, that students see a real application of mathematics and programming. Second, students have a positive experience of mathematics — in other words, they have fun doing projects involving mathematics and programming.
I can only hope that the course I’ve designed really does give students such a positive experience. It really is necessary to bolster the perception of mathematics and computer science in society, and ideally Mathematics and Digital Art will do just that!
Creativity in Mathematics 