Engineering education, past & future

Kern You Believe It? A Typographical Tango with AI

Oct 18, 2024

As someone who enjoys playing with images, words, and typography, I'm always seeking new ways to generate ideas. I recently tried an experiment: collaborating with an AI language model (Claude) on a series of typographical designs. It all started after I had created...

SITE 2008: A preview

Feb 28, 2008

Matt and I are at the SITE conference next week. He has blogged about it here... so I need to do my bit. We have a busy schedule at Las Vegas, which means less time for all the fun stuff. The big one is the Keynote by Matt and myself (more details below). Here is a...

Creativity & Flow: New article

Apr 14, 2017

180-degree rotational ambigram for "Flow" by Punya Mishra The next article in our series Rethinking Technology & Creativity in the 21st Century just got published by the journal TechTrends. This article features Susan Perry, social psychologist,...

The new convergence

Nov 6, 2023

I recently received an email from dean recommending this post titled Thoughts on Now and Then by Andrew Hickey. In this extended essay Hickey provides his thoughts on the new Beatles remake, Now and Then. The essay is a thoughtful and loving analysis of human...

How not to conduct research

Jul 23, 2013

Note: This post has been edited somewhat to (a) clearly hide the url, which I had not done a good job of before; and (b) to add a few suggestions in the last paragraph for some strategies to make it easier for the participants to take part in the study. (September...

GeoGreeting!

Oct 1, 2008

I often do an assignment with my students where they go looking for letterforms in nature. Leigh Wolf just sent me this link to GeoGreeting.com which takes the same idea - but conceptualizes it on a global scale. Check out this example.

$Math & Visual Wordplay: New video$

Math & Visual Wordplay: New video

Oct 5, 2016

The word "math" written such that it has rotational symmetryi.e. it reads the same even when rotated by 180-degrees. The relationship between mathematics and visual wordplay is one I have played with and writing about for a while (More here). I just discovered...

On designing aesthetic educational experiences in science

May 30, 2023

What is the role of beauty (and aesthetics) in science in science education? This is something that I have been interested in for a long time, going back to highschool. Over the years I have built a small body of scholarship around this topic. Sadly, this work does...

Slipping into uncanny valley

May 6, 2008

MindHacks has a great post related to some of my previous postings about anthropomorphizing interactive artifacts (see here and here) - just that this time these artifacts under discussion are robots. As it turns out, sometime too much similarity between humans and...