I have always been interested in what lies at the intersection of science and art. There are of course many different ways of looking at this. There is the idea of scientific creativity being both similar to and different from artistic creativity. And then there is the idea of artistically representing scientific ideas. I have written about this elsewhere in the context of poetry (both scientific poetry / sci-po or mathematical poetry / math-po). I have also argued that this process of “translation” from one medium to another is a very powerful way of both understanding the issues at hand but could also be an interesting teaching tool. For instance see these sci-po’s written by Sean Nash’s students. As I had said before, echoing Sean, in the context of writing a mathematical proof in verse (click here if you are interested), this act of writing a poem about mathematics forces you to truly and deeply understand the idea before you can start playing with it.

Such artistic representations of science can also be a powerful tool for outreach – to communicate often abstruse and complex ideas to a wider audience. One of the best approaches that has received some attention in the past years is Dance your Ph.D. As the Science Mag website says

The dreaded question. “So, what’s your Ph.D. research about?” You could bore them with an explanation. Or you could dance.

That’s the idea behind “Dance Your Ph.D.” Over the past 3 years, scientists from around the world have teamed up to create dance videos based on their graduate research. This year’s contest, launched in June by Science, received 45 brave submissions.

Today, judges—including scientists, choreographers, and past winners—announced the finalists in four categories: physics, chemistry, biology, and social sciences. Each receives $500.

Click here to see and vote for the finalists.

A few randomly selected blog posts…

Representing the election

How does one best represent all the voting information that we now collect as a part of the electoral process? Here are a few websites that really stood out for me. Send me any more that you have and I can add them to the list. The first is a series of cartograms...

The opposite of truth

Niels Bohr, the 1922 Nobel Laureate in Physics once said: The opposite of a correct statement is an incorrect statement. The opposite of a profound truth is another profound truth. I was reminded of this when I saw this TED video. Check it out... (h/t Andrew...

Educational Change by Design: A school for the future

Educational Change by Design: A school for the future

How do we design a school for the future? This recent article seeks to capture (in the form of a case study) our recent experience in designing such a school. The design process was a collaborative process involving a partnership with a local school district and the...

Exploring visual space with mathematics

Stacy Clause just sent me this very cool link to an article titled Exploring logo designs with Mathematica. In this article, Chris Carlson, of the User Design Group at Mathematia shows how one can mathematically develop variations on commercial logo designs by the...

Wong, Mishra, Koehler & Adams (2007)

Wong, D., Mishra, P., Koehler, M.J., & Adams, S. (2007). Teacher as Filmmaker: iVideos, Technology Education, and Professional Development. To appear in M. Girod & J. Steed (Eds.), Technology in the college classroom. Stillwater, Oklahoma: New Forums Press. Abstract:...

TPACK newsletter #32, March 2017

TPACK newsletter #32, March 2017

TPACK triplet design by Punya Mishra The latest version of the TPACK newsletter (#32) can be found here- March 2017 (pdf). All previous issues are archived here. A shout-out to Judi Harris for all the work that goes into this.

Affective feedback from computers (Mishra, 2006)

Mishra, P. (2006). Affective Feedback from Computers and its Effect on Perceived Ability and Affect: A Test of the Computers as Social Actor Hypothesis. Journal of Educational Multimedia and Hypermedia. 15 (1), pp. 107-131. Abstract: We report an experimental study...

The future will not be a multiple choice test

From Chris Sloan, teacher at Judge Memorial Catholic High School and a student in our hybrid PhD program, comes a link to a TED talk. The description is as follows: Creative genius Drew Davies and forward-thinking educator Jaime McGrath propose a new approach to...

Sketching MSUrbanSTEM

Sketching MSUrbanSTEM

I have been playing with my iPad a bit, experimenting with sketching and drawing apps for a few months now. I have realized that it is important to give yourself a task, a clear end-goal to work towards if I had to get anywhere. So with that in mind, I decided to...

2 Comments

  1. Punya Mishra

    How did I miss these two! And how come they are not on Youtube? 🙂

    Reply
  2. Evrim

    Well actually, last year at SITE conference, during our graduate student gathering, I did a TPACK Dance and Daniel did a Robocraft one. We were not as professional as the one in the videos though. I have some ideas for a TPACK dance choreography, need some brave people to make it real.

    Reply

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