The rainfall in June –the poems I’ve pasted to wallspeel off, but leave traces.~ Basho All photos taken with my iPhone8©punyamishra
Posts related to: Aesthetics
Arizona in black & white
Over the past two years in Arizona I have had the opportunity to indulge in my love for photography. Recently I felt the need to play with Adobe Sparks - and what better way to learn a new tool than to use it to create a photo album. Enjoy.
Expert eyes on creativity
Since 2012, the Deep-Play Research Group has been publishing a series of articles under the broad rubric of Rethinking Technology & Creativity in the 21st Century in the journal Tech Trends. This has led to 33 articles (and counting) and...
Fractals, ambigrams & more
Photo & and design © Punya Mishra.The photo of bubbles was taken with cell phone camera (equipped with a macro lens). Fractals are mathematical/geometrical structures that exhibit self-similarity at increasingly small (or large) scales. Fractals were...
Contemplating creativity
Photo/Image Credit: Punya Mishra Dr. Jonathon Plucker is an educational psychologist at Johns Hopkins University where he is the Julian C. Stanley Professor of Talent Development in the School of Education. He has received numerous recognitions for his work, including...
Paradoxes, illusions & visual wordplay
Figure 1: Eye-llusion Over the past few months I have been somewhat obsessed with visual illusions, ambiguous images, impossible figures and other such fun stuff. This led to the design of a brand new optical illusion, combining an ambiguous image with an...
Education by Design, new fall course
I am excited about my new fall course, titled Education by Design. This is a heavily reimagined version of a class that I taught a couple of times at MSU and once here (last fall at ASU). The MSU version that I co-taught with Danah Henriksen received First...
Unleashing Creativity: ISTE interview
A few months ago I was interviewed for an article in Empowered Learner, an ISTE member magazine. The final article, Unleashing every genius: Creative genius isn't rare – but the conditions that nurture it are is now online. You can access the entire issue of the...
New optical illusion: An oscillating visual paradox!
A design for the word "illusions" inspired by a design by Scott Kim. I have been obsessed with optical illusions for for a long time. This interest has played out in many ways: from the hundreds of ambigrams I have created to the new year’s videos we create as a...
Design, Intuition & Creativity
Chain-Rotational ambigram design for the word "design."One can read the word both clockwise from the top or anti-clockwise, from the bottom. Our latest article in the series we write for the journal TechTrends (under the broad rubric of Rethinking Technology...
Squaring a circle on Pi day!
Pie upon reflection is nothing but 3.14!A new version of a design I had created a year ago.Original idea stolen from the Interwebs Since it is Pi(e) day, I thought it would be fun to share another design I had created a while ago in response to one of the...
NEW BOOK! Creativity, Technology & Education
I am thrilled to announce the publication of a new book, a Mishra-Henriksen production titled Creativity, Technology & Education: Exploring their Convergence. This book is a collection of essays that first appeared the...
Social Media: New Ambigram
New 180-degree rotational Ambigram for "Social Media:"
Cybernetics, design & creativity
180 degree rotational ambigram for the word "cybernetic," ©punyamishra Here is the next article in our series Rethinking Technology & Creativity in the 21st Century for the journal TechTrends featuring an interview with Dr. Paul...
STEM teaching & leadership for urban educators
The MSUrbanSTEM project was one of the best projects I have ever been part of. We worked with 124 Chicago Public School STEM educators over three years, in an effort to develop their teaching and leadership in the STEM areas. We have written about this...
The beauty of randomness
I have always been intrigued by the idea of how truly random our lives really are. Seemingly minor events can trigger effects, rippling through our lives, effects becoming causes, leading to profound changes and transformations. Ray Bradbury's short...
2017 Torrance Lecture on Creativity
This past April, I delivered the annual E. Paul Torrance Lecture at the University of Georgia. Being invited to give this talk was a huge honor, for two main reasons. First, because of Paul Torrance, the person for whom this lecture is named. Dr. Torrance, known...
Origin-al Interface snafu!
The Origins Project at ASU is an attempt to explore humankind's most fundamental questions about our origins. As the website says, This project brings "together a diverse collection of the world’s leading scientists, scholars, and public intellectuals...
Robert Pirsig, 1928 – 2017
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance was one of those books that have influenced me deeply. I read it when I was in high school and read it again and again, almost obsessively for a while. It was my companion through college, graduate school and beyond. I...
Shulman on learning
One of my favorite quotes about learning. From this article, Taking Learning Seriously the entirety of which is worth reading. But for now here is the quote, and a visual (just because): Learning is least useful when it is private and hidden; it is most powerful when...
Hidden Figures
In honor of the movie "Hidden Figures" here is a new figure-ground ambigram. Enjoy.
Failed Haiku
Failed Haiku Five syllables firstSecond one has seven moreA failed Haiku! So close... almost had it. In keeping with the meta-theme, here is another one, written many years ago, and lightly edited by Danah Henriksen. Turvy-Topsy limerick This limerick-wiseHas not...
Untangling a decade of creativity scholarship
How do we capture a program of scholarship in an image? This is particularly complicated when the work is a tangled web of connections between research, teaching and practice, spread out over multiple publications, presentations and people. One attempt to do...
Coding + Aesthetics: New Journal Article
Does beauty have a role to play in learning to code? Can code aspire to beauty and elegance? In this article, we argue that it does and it should. Read on... Good, J., Keenan, S. & Mishra, P. (2016). Education:=Coding+Aesthetics; Aesthetic Understanding,...